Nature on our doorsteps: Flaming Poinsettia
By Rosaleen Dwyer
Potted plants are gifts that we like to give around Christmas and New year, the most popular being Poinsettia.
Grown primarily for its festive red and green colouring, white, yellow, and some unusual speckled varieties can also be found.
Poinsettia was first brought into America from Mexico in 1825 by Joel Roberts Poinsett, after whom the plant was named.
He was the United States Ambassador to Mexico at the time and he was also a keen botanist.
What appear to be colourful red or white ‘flowers’ are in fact ‘bracts’.
Bracts are leaves that occur just below the plant’s true flowers but which take on a colour or shape that give the appearance of being petals.
Their bright colours act to attract insects to the plant’s true flowers which are the small, yellow structures located in the centre.
Poinsettia is a member of the Spurge family of plants. These can ooze a white latex from their stems when broken and this can be a skin irritant to some people.
Poinsettia’s bracts need very special light conditions to develop their colours – darkness for 12 hours at a time, for at least five days in a row.
There is a lot involved therefore to make it ‘bloom’ again for next Christmas!
