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A Gift from Mexico
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10337 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
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12 / 1993 |
2,258 Words |
| Author
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H. Marc Cathey And Jacqueline Heriteau
H. Marc Cathey, former director of the U.S. National Arboretum, wrote the industry guidelines on the use of light to control size, shape, color, pollution tolerance, and flowering of florist, and nursery-grown plants, including the poinsettia. He is president and CEO of the American Horticultural Society in Mount Vernon, Virginia. Jacqueline Heriteau is the author of more than 30 books on gardening and cooking, including the National Arboretum Book of Outstanding Garden Plants. She coauthors the biweekly Washington Times question-and-answer garden column called "Dr. Cathey Says." |
Long before Christmas came to the Western Hemisphere and adopted the poinsettia, it was cherished by the Aztecs. The brilliant red of the plant the Indians of Mexico called Cuetlaxochitl was prized as a symbol of purity by Aztec kings, including the last emperor, Montezuma (1466-1520). They also had practical applications for the plant. From the pointed bracts that turn red in November and December, they extracted a reddish purple dye used as a cosmetic, and the milky white latex sap went into a medicinal preparation to counteract fever.
A 10-foot-tall, stiff-caned shrub, the evergreen poinsettia is native to Central America and tropical Mexico. In the early seventeenth century, a settlement of Franciscan priests in the arid, tropical highlands near Taxco, a town in southern Mexico, incorporated the poinsettia's bright red blossoms into a nativity procession; one of the priests, Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, made the custom known to Europe in letters he sent to Spain. But two centuries passed before the poinsettia was introduced to the United States, and a hundred years more before it became established as the world's best-known Christmas flower, and Big Business.
It was Joel Roberts Poinsett, a cosmopolitan American statesman, who set the poinsettia on the road to stardom. In 1825, President James Madison appointed Poinsett to be the first U.S. minister (ambassador) to turbulent Mexico. Something of a Renaissance man, Poinsett was known for the fierce courage with which he handled challenges to the young U.S. government. In Mexico City Poinsett lived up to his reputation, facing down revolutionary mobs threatening people who were under the protection of the U.S. Embassy. The son of a French physician/apothecary and a former medical student, Poinsett was also an able botanist. While his heroic missions to Latin America have been consigned to the dustbin of history--as has his role as a founder of the precursor to the Smithsonian Institution--his interest in the plant that turned red at Christmas is likely to immortalize his name.
In 1828, Poinsett sent poinsettia plants back to his home in Charleston, South Carolina. The first known U.S.-grown poinsettias were propagated quite casually in Poinsett's greenhouses and distributed to family friends and botanical gardens. Among the friends was John Bartram of Philadelphia. Bartram passed the gift plant on to Robert Buist, a Pennsylvania nurseryman, and it was Buist who first sold the poinsettia under the botanical name it now bears, Euphorbia pulcherima--which means the most beautiful euphorbia. (It also has acquired many colorful common names: Flower of the Holy Night, Christmas
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