Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff Lauren Volbom Here. The poinsettia is the plant equivalent of Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas Is You. You perhaps don't even remember it exists until the first day you walk into a store in November, and suddenly it is the holiday season. You're positively bombarded with it until January, at which point both disappear again for another ten months, making you wonder what they get up to while they're
laying in wait. But just like Mariah's popular Christmas bop, point setias are economically important. They're the highest selling potted plant in the world during the holiday shopping season the six weeks leading up to Christmas. Some seventy million point setia is worth some two hundred and fifty million dollars are sold in the United States alone, and they're about twice as popular in Europe. Point Setias were cultivated by peoples within the Triple Alliance of what's now Central Mexico.
That is, the empire of three main city states now often called the Aztec Empire, though that name was applied retroactively and a little confusingly. The flowers didn't actually grow in the capital city of pinoch Titlan and now Mexico City, but reportedly Triple Alliance rulers imported thousands of plants every winter from warmer lower elevations for use as an ornamental, and also used different extracts from the plant as medicine
and as a reddish purple fabric dye. In these centuries since it's been called the lobster flower, the flame leaf flower, the Star of Love, and the flower of the Holy Night. A butt Poinsettia is probably the weirdest name of all, because it's just a shout out to the American diplomat who's credited with being the first to bring them back
to the US from Mexico in the eighteen hundreds. Joel Roberts Pointset was the first US minister to Mexico, and as an amateur botanist, is said to have sent some cuttings back to his home in South Carolina from southern Mexican go in eighteen twenty eight. Though there's no irrefutable proof of this, what is known is that the plant
was on display in Philadelphia in eighteen twenty nine. Associated with Poinsett's name, it was an immediate hit and was henceforth known as the poinsettia in the English speaking United States and parts of Europe. A note that pointsett was not well liked in Mexico. The term points at tismo is sometimes still used there today to describe an arrogant
person who oversteps their authority at any rate. In the nineteen twenties, the Eki family of southern California started farming poinsettias, and they tirelessly pushed them as a symbol of the
Christmas season. Today, around seventy percent of the point Setia plants you buy in the United States come from the Eki ranch, and point Setia care is their lifeblood, although many of us only encounter these plants in a potted and possibly disposable form in December of Poinsettias are a perennial winter flowering shrub with milky sap and branches so
long that they sometimes look like vines. In the mid elevation regions of Mexico and Central America where they're from, or gardens where they're successfully grown, they can reach over ten feet or three meters tall and will die down but come back every year. The big, showy red or white or pink flowers that we're used to seeing aren't actually the poinsettia's flowers at all, but modified leaves called bracts. The actual flowers are those small yellow buds in the
middle of the colorful bracts. When you buy a poinsettia in a store, it already comes sporting its brightly colored, fancy bracts, and you might have no idea how hard it was to get them there. One Fritz Bar, the author of the nineteen thirty seven guide Fritz Bar's Commercial Floriculture, A Practical Manual for the Retail Grower, describe the delicate
and finicky poinsettia thus sleep. Perhaps no other plant or flower we handle during Christmas week is more short lived, Wilt's quicker, or it is more disappointing to those who are it. Yet when the next Christmas comes around, there comes again the same demand for poinsettias, and the disappointments
of a year ago are all forgotten. Over time, floor culturists overcame some of these problems, but until the mid nineteen fifties, growing poinsettias and getting them into the hands of holiday revelers in relatively good shape was a real trick. That was until somebody realized the poinsettias need just one thing to turn their green bracts red, pink, or white,
total darkness. In order to induce your poinsettia plant to create flower buds and to change the color of its leaves from green in time for Christmas, it must be kept in complete darkness for sixteen hours a day. The withholding of light prevents the plant from producing chlorophyll, which
is what makes plant parts green. This lets the bracts change to whatever shade of red, pink, white, or orange they develop, depending on the variety of the poinsettia, and there are about one hundred types grown in the US. In order to make that happen, you need to subject your plant to about two months of sixteen hours of
uninterrupted darkness per day, alternated with eight hours of bright light. Oh, which means that if you were looking for those bright colors this holiday season and you're listening to this episode as it comes out, you're out of luck, though you might be just in time for a showy Valentine's Day. To achieve bright December foliage start somewhere around September twenty first,
right around the fall equinox. Pull your point setia out of its sunny window after eight hours and move it into sixteen hours of uninterrupted darkness like put it under a box if necessary. During the dark period, the plant cannot receive even the slightest bit of light at any time.
You can just continue this around Thanksgiving. After Thanksgiving, keep your point stetia in bright light or the full sun of a sunny window, not keeping the potting soil moist or adding excess water, but watering it when the soil is dry to the touch. Point setias prefer temperatures around or above sixty five degrees fahrenheit that's about eighteen degrees
celsius boom from December until about April. At this point, it's a good idea to cut your pointetia down to a three to two eight inch stem that's about eight to twenty centimeters and let it regrow, treating it normally until the next year. But wait, are these plants poisonous? One common urban legend about point cetias is that they're toxic to people and animals. However, this seems to stem from a single unfounded story that starts circulating around nineteen nineteen.
Maybe there's some crossover with stories about easter lilies, which are in fact very toxic to cats. In the Meanwhile, exhaustive studies have found that all parts of the poinsettia are safe for incidental exposure. A one study showed that a fifty pound or twenty five kilo child would have to eat over one pound or half a kilo of poinsettia leaves between five hundred and six hundred leaves the
toxicity to become a problem. However, they don't taste very good, and the child who ate them would probably get a tummy ache long before they were poisoned. However, there is an exception here. Pointsettias contain a milky sap that can set off a latex allergy in people with severe latex sensitivities. Just being in the same room with the point Cetia plant might set off a rash or other symptoms, though case reports have shown that these will resolve after normal
treatment with antihistamines. Be safe out there and enjoy your bract based holiday decorations responsibly. Today's episode is based on the article Poinsettia, the Mexican Christmas flower that blooms in the dark on HowStuffWorks dot Com written by Jesslyn Shields. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with hostuffworks
dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.