Meet the Family That Patented and Potted the Poinsettia

The Smithsonian blog put up a nice, brief history of the poinsettia, bane of middle school children forced to sell a dozen every December as part of mysterious “fundraisers.” The plant, which is not actually poisonous, was renamed for “U.S. Ambassador Joel Roberts Poinsett, the man who brought it back from a trip to Mexico in the 1830s,” but its current state of being is credited to the “Ecke family, [who] has more than 500 U.S. plant patents, nearly one-fifth of them for poinsettias, and holds even more in other countries across the world.”

The earliest poinsettias were sold by individual florists and merchants — including the patriarch of the family, Albert Ecke, a German immigrant — and usually as single-cut stems instead of rooted in pots. But they were hardly durable; most would last two or three days, at best. The Eckes helped transition poinsettias from ephemeral flowers to potted plants, created new shapes and introduced new colors (from shades of white and yellow to those that have names, “ice punch,” “pink peppermint” and “strawberries and cream” among them). They’re vastly different from the poinsettias Americans knew a century ago, which were actually quite “scraggly,” says Paul Ecke III, who sold the Ecke Family Ranch in 2012.

The Eckes eventually “created about 100 varieties which boasted different colors, blooming times and arrangements of leaves, and for half a century, held on to about 90 percent of the poinsettia market, until a graduate student revealed the process through a thesis in 1992.” Eckes family: ya burnt. [Smithsonian]