The poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima) is the most popular Christmas flower. A shrub with red leaves, it is showy and colorful, but its blossoms are minuscule. Its colorful red leaves, the part most people think of as the flower, are called bracts. The actual blossoms are the tiny green or yellow buds in the center of the bracts' clusters.
It is also often mispronounced. The correct pronunciation is poin'-set-ee-ah.
Although the poinsettia has become a traditional symbol of Christmas, its history predates Christianity in the Americas.
The Aztecs put it to symbolic and practical use, prizing the plant, which was indigenous to an area south of Mexico City. From its bracts, they extracted a reddish-purple dye for textiles and cosmetics. The milky white sap, called latex, helped treat fevers. The plant also represented purity, serving as a reminder of human blood sacrifices.
In the 17th century, Franciscan friars displayed poinsettias during their Christmas celebrations, and the custom spread throughout Mexico.
In Mexican legend, a small boy knelt at the altar of his village church on Christmas Eve with nothing to offer but his prayers. Through a miracle, a brilliant red-and-green poinsettia sprang up at the boy's feet.
The poinsettia was brought to the USA from Mexico in 1829 by Joel Roberts Poinsett (1775 - 1851). Poinsett was an amateur botanist when President John Quincy Adams appointed him the first U.S. ambassador to Mexico in 1825. Poinsett became captivated by the bright red roadside plant that Mexicans call flor de noche buena, "flower of the holy night."
Poinsett became deeply involved in Mexico's politics and was soon meddling in its affairs and those of other Latin American nations. An exasperated Mexican government expelled him in 1829, declaring him persona non grata.
Poinsett took clippings of the noche buena to his South Carolina plantation, where they thrived in his greenhouse. He distributed plants to other botanists and friends, and the flower became identified with him around 1836.
Poinsett became secretary of war in 1837 and helped found the Smithsonian Institute in 1841. He died Dec. 12, 1851.
But the enduring popularity of poinsettias in the U.S. is due largely to the gardening and marketing skills of a little-known Southern Californian family.
Albert and Henrietta Ecke and their four children emigrated from Germany in 1902, planning a brief stop in Los Angeles en route to Fiji, where they planned to open a vegetarian health spa. But the rich soil and ideal climate in what would become Eagle Rock persuaded them to stay.
Albert Ecke planted fruit trees and opened a dairy farm, where he dabbled in growing gladiolus, chrysanthemums and poinsettias, selling them at roadside stands.
In 1906, as property values rose in Eagle Rock, Ecke sold the farm and relocated to Sherman, now West Hollywood, devoting a small section of the new farm to dairy cows and the rest to poinsettias. The sight of the red poinsettia fields began drawing busloads of tourists.
Ecke started experimenting with potted plants, shipping them east from his packing house on Sunset Boulevard. The packing house later became the Roxy Theatre on the Sunset Strip.
Albert Ecke died in 1919, leaving 24-year-old Paul Ecke in charge of the family business. Paul bought more land in West Hollywood for $500 an acre, and devoted time to perfect the first poinsettia that could be successfully grown as an indoor plant.
Paul Ecke promoted the poinsetia worldwide. In 1923, when urbanization encroached on his operation, Ecke moved south, to what would become 25 acres of greenhouses on 68 acres of land in Encinitas and another 60 acres in Guatemala.
A generation later, in 1949, Paul Ecke Jr. earned a degree in horticulture and went to work for his father. He persuaded his dad to sell cuttings, which were easier to transport than mother plants. The advent of jet airfreight made it possible to quickly ship delicate cuttings to growers, who could then get mature plants quickly to market.
In 1991, Paul "Mr. Poinsettia" Ecke Sr. died at age 96 and that year Congress declared Dec. 12 as National Poinsettia Day. His son, Paul Jr., died in 2002 at 76.
So successful were the Eckes at developing and promoting the poinsettia that today, including licensing deals, the Ecke Ranch is the source of more than 70% of the nation's poinsettias.
"The sea waves that have fixed themselves most firmly in the human imagination are the so-called tidal waves. The term is popularly applied to two very different kinds of wave, neither of which has any relation to the tide. One is the seismic sea wave, produced by an undersea earthquake; the other is an exceptionally vast wind wave—an immense mass of water driven far above the normal high-water line by winds of hurricane force.
"Most of the seismic sea waves, now called tsunamis, are born in the deep trenches of the ocean floor. The Japan trench, the Aleutian trench, and the Atacama trench have produced waves that have taken many human lives. A trench is a natural breeder of earthquakes; it is a place of disturbed and uneasy equilibrium, a place in which the sea floor has buckled and warped down to form the deepest pits of the earth's surface.
"The writings of man contain frequent mention of the devastation of coastal settlements by sudden great waves. One of the earliest on record rose along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean in 358 A.D., passed completely over islands, and flooded low-lying shores, depositing boats on the housetops of Alexandria, and drowning thousands of people. An hour after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, Cádiz was visited by a wave that is said to have been fifty feet higher than the highest tide. Waves from this same disturbance travelled across the Atlantic, reaching the West Indies in nine and a half hours. In 1868, a stretch of nearly three thousand miles of the western coast of South America was shaken by earthquakes. Shortly after the most violent shocks, the sea receded, leaving ships that had been anchored in forty feet of water stranded in mud; then the water returned in a great wave and the ships were carried a quarter of a mile inland.
"This withdrawal of the sea from its normal stand is often the first warning of the approach of seismic sea waves. Natives on the beaches of Hawaii on the first of April, 1946, were alarmed when the accustomed voice of the breakers was suddenly stilled. They could not know that this recession of the waves from the reefs and the shallow coastal waters was the sea's response to an earthquake on the steep slopes of the Aleutian trench, twenty-three hundred miles away, or that in a matter of moments the water would rise rapidly but without surf, as though the tide were coming in much too fast. The rise carried the ocean waters twenty-five feet or more above normal high tide. In the open ocean, as is characteristic of seismic sea waves, the waves produced by the Aleutian quake were only about a foot or two high and would not be noticed from a vessel. Their length, however, was enormous, the distance between crests being about ninety miles. It took the waves less than five hours to reach the Hawaiian chain, so they must have moved at a speed of about four hundred and seventy miles an hour. Along the shores of the eastern Pacific, they were recorded as far into the Southern Hemisphere as Valparaíso, Chile; the distance, eight thousand and sixty-six miles from the epicenter of the earthquake, was covered by the waves in eighteen hours."
- Rachel Carson, The New Yorker, 1951
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