Long before a clever marketer turned it into a Christmas staple, the Aztec and Maya celebrated poinsettia for its medicinal value
Think “poinsettia” and you think “Christmas,” right? Well, think again. At the time of the first Christmas, the closest poinsettia to the little town of Bethlehem was 8,000 miles away, clinging to life in a rocky canyon in what’s now southwestern Mexico.Mark Hoddle
“When you break a leaf or branch of a poinsettia, it leaks a milky white sap,” Hoddle says. “The cultures believed that sap had healing properties.” Aztecs applied the sap to the breasts of nursing mothers to increase milk production. They also used the sap as a depilatory. Yet despite all his exploits, Poinsett is remembered primarily as the amateur botanist who became fascinated with those red and green plants from Mexico. He sent some home to Charleston, where people began growing them in their gardens. Their notoriety grew under a variation of Poinsett’s name.For the first 100 years or so after those first transplants arrived in Charleston, fragile poinsettias were nearly impossible to keep alive in a pot. They were sold primarily as cut flowers.
Clarke doesn’t have a sample of Joel Poinsett’s iteration, but his chronology does include a close relative: the legendary St. Louis Red. The first mass-produced poinsettia, it was introduced in 1924 by Louis Bordet of Missouri.
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