Christmas flower - poinsettias - Brief Article

When Paul Ecke III inspects his business operations, the effect is like Moses parting the Red Sea. Washed in the milky light peculiar to greenhouses, Ecke glides through an ocean of crimson: 'Red Satin', 'Red Baron', and, of course, 'Freedom'.

Ecke pauses to admire one especially pulchritudinous example of this last specimen. "'Freedom' is our Michael Jordan," he says. "It is as good at what it does as Michael Jordan is."

'Freedom' is a poinsettia. If as you read this you have a holiday poinsettia lurking nearby, you have Paul Ecke III and his family to thank.

Euphorbia pulcherrima played a large role in my childhood Christmases. I grew up in Ventura, a Southern California town that styled itself "The Poinsettia City by the Sea." Out of civic duty, residents annually acquired poinsettias by the truckload, until it seemed to me the flower must have been part of Christmas since the time of the original St. Nicholas.

The reality is different, I find when I visit the Paul Ecke Ranch, in Encinitas on the San Diego County coast.

"The poinsettia was named for Joel Poinsett," Ecke tells me. "He was the first American ambassador to Mexico." In 1828, Ecke explains, Poinsett noticed the plant growing near Taxco and sent it home to South Carolina. It might have remained mere botanical novelty were it not for Ecke's ancestors.

"My great-grandfather Albert emigrated from Germany," Ecke says. Albert Ecke farmed land in Hollywood. He sold produce and cut flowers, including a few poinsettias he had probably found growing wild. These plants had an interesting feature: As December neared, reduced hours of daylight turned their leaves from green to red.

Until then, the plant most associated with Christmas was the cyclamen. But Albert's son, Paul, realized the red-and-green poinsettia could be a bigger draw. "He took those flowers to florists across the U.S.," Paul Ecke III tells me. "He said, 'Here is a plant you can sell at Christmas.'" It was the 1920s, the decade when Hollywood burst onto the American scene, and Ecke benefited from reflected show business glamour. "When Paul Ecke showed up from Southern California, it was a big deal."

Ecke succeeded in getting countless articles about poinsettias in newspapers and magazines. His son, Paul Jr., who took over the business in the 1960s, even more successfully capitalized on television. "Oh," Ecke Sr. says when we bump into him at the ranch lunchroom, "we put poinsettias on the Bob Hope Christmas special. And every year on Johnny Carson." Says Paul Ecke III, "It was subliminal. When it's December, you need a Christmas tree and you need a poinsettia."

The Eckes changed the poinsettia as well. The original plant was leggy and spindly-leafed. The Eckes' poinsettia breeding programs made it voluptuous and technicolored: not just red but, if you wanted, candy-cane-striped or impressionist pink, although the red 'Freedom' remains the biggest seller.

These days, blooming poinsettias constitute a relatively small percentage of the Eckes' business. The ranch mainly sells cuttings, which are shipped to growers who then use them to cultivate finished plants. In this slightly indirect fashion, the Eckes are responsible for some 80 percent of the poinsettias in the United States and Canada. Theirs is an American success story, and yet, as I walk through the greenhouses with Paul Ecke III, I find myself feeling a bit crestfallen. It is a strange thing about Christmas. You expect all its artifacts to possess the permanence of the original story. To discover that the Christmas flower of my youth owes its success to Bob Hope TV specials is disconcerting, like discovering that Handel's Messiah was in fact written for Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Ecke shows me one last greenhouse: another sea of red. "Should we sell poinsettias the rest of the year?" he asks rhetorically. "In France and Australia, they do. But I haven't been convinced." In his mind, the poinsettia is still the Christmas flower.

And, of course, it is in my mind too. I give in and buy a poinsettia, a very large 'Freedom', its leaves the red of Santa Claus's velvet suit. I belt the poinsettia into the car seat next to me. Throughout the drive home, I keep glancing at it, and every time I do, I think, "Well, Christmas is here." Just as the Eckes knew I would.