Poinsettia – Photo by Tony Hisgett from Birmingham,

Dear Readers, there have been lots of posts on social media this year of sad-looking poinsettias gradually dying outside supermarkets across the land. I often wonder about these plants – they’re sold so cheaply, and I suspect that the overworked supermarket staff have no time to water them or keep an eye on them. Poinsettias, being particularly choosy plants, often suffer the most – over water them and their leaves drop off and they turn soft and mushy, but if you don’t water them at all the leaves also drop off and the whole plant dries up to twigs. Alas! To be honest this is not a plant that does well with benign neglect, and, as with puppies and kittens, Christmas is probably the worst time to bring a new pot plant home unless it really can take care of itself (like an Amaryllis for example). Read on for how to help your poor beleaguered poinsettia to survive from year to year, and how it became so associated with Christmas.

Dear Readers, I can scarcely believe that I haven’t done a post on poinsettia before, but here it is, in all its Christmassy glory. Who would have thought that this plant is actually a Euphorbia? In the wild, it lives in Mexico and Central America, and is named after Joel Poinsett, the first United States Minister to Mexico. Poinsettia grow to the size of a small tree if left unmolested, but most of them live their lives in a pot as a temporary house plant, being thrown in the bin at the end of the Christmas period as they lose their leaves and start to look extremely sad. It doesn’t have to be this way, though! Read on!

As you probably know, the red ‘flowers’ are actually leaves, or bracts, with the actual flowers being the little yellow and green blobs in the middle. They have been cultivated to appear in a variety of other colours, including cerise,  white and salmon. However, pretty as they are, cultivated poinsettias are diseased, according to Clare Wilson at New Scientist – to make short, bushy plants, growers infect poinsettias with a bacteria that causes them to grow lots more side shoots that terminate in those colourful bracts.

Poinsettia varieties (Photo By Andy Mabbett )

If you are lucky enough to receive a poinsettia at Christmas, the advice is not to overwater it – wait until the plant’s leaves are just starting to droop, and then put them in to a bowl of water for about an hour. The plant should also be kept at a fairly stable temperature (i.e. not next to a window where they’ll be cold overnight) – Wilson’s article mentions that the plants don’t need high light levels for the month or two that they’ll be on display, so they can be positioned well away from a window.

But are poinsettias poisonous? There was an urban legend in the 1920s that a child had died after ingesting a leaf, but this was later found to be untrue. Like all euphorbias, they can cause skin irritation, and I wouldn’t want to eat a poinsettia risotto or feed any to my dog or cat, but generally they are inoffensive plants. The Aztecs used the plant for traditional medicine, and one of the active chemicals in poinsettia is being investigated as a potential drug to treat Alzheimers disease.

Poinsettias in front of an altar in the Philippines (Photo By Ramon FVelasquez)

In Mexico, a 16th century legend tells of a poor girl who wanted to bring some flowers to the altar at Christmas, but couldn’t afford to buy any. An angel told her to pick some weeds and in the morning they had turned into poinsettias. The red colour is supposed to represent the blood of Christ, and the flower shape the Star of Bethlehem. And goodness, we have just missed National Poinsettia Day, which is on 12th December. Apparently the poinsettia is the most valuable potted plant in the world in terms of sales, with over 70 million plants sold in the US every year, to a value of about $250m.

How sad, then, that by January most of the plants are looking very sad, with their leaves dropping off and their glory much reduced. My Dad was a dab hand at bringing them back to life for the following Christmas, and though I’m pretty sure that he didn’t do anything as scientific as the advice below, it’s certainly possible.

Andrew Fuller from Bridge Farm Group in Spalding, UK, recommends that the poinsettia gets 12 to 14 hours of darkness per day for about two months once it’s lost its leaves. You can do this by putting the plant into a cupboard for that period, or sticking a bag over it. In a commercial greenhouse, the plants are actually ‘put to bed’ by pulling the curtains every night, which seems rather sweet to me. You will have to remember to do it every night, though. I have a suspicion that Dad just put the poinsettia into a room that wasn’t well lit for a few months and held off on the watering, to ‘give it a rest’.

And finally, a poem, by Jamaican poet Claude McKay (1889 – 1948). As I look out at the snow, it reminds me that for many people, December is a warm month. What a thought.