Poinsettias were valued by the ancient Aztecs for religious ceremonies, to make red dye for clothing and to cure fevers using its latex sap. Montezuma, the last Aztec king, adorned his palaces in what is now known as Mexico City with brightly colored poinsettia plants.

Poinsettias were unknown in the U.S. and would have remained a regional plant, until 1828 when the first U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Dr. Joel Roberts Poinsett, while wondering the Mexican countryside, discovered a beautiful tree with large red flowers growing next to a road. He brought back cuttings and introduced the poinsettia to Americans for use as landscape plants and as a cut flower. The poinsettia plant is named in honor of Dr. Poinsett’s “discovery”.

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Poinsettias caught on slowly in the U.S. until 1900 when a German immigrant, Albert Ecke, living in Los Angeles became intrigued by the plant and sold them from street stands. His son, Paul Ecke developed a grafting technique in the 1960s that changed the somewhat weedy look to a bushier plant. It was marketing-savvy, Paul Ecke, Jr. who was responsible in the 1970s for popularizing poinsettias with Christmas. He sent heaps of free plants from Thanksgiving to Christmas to television broadcast stations like the Tonight Show and The Bob Hope Christmas Specials, etc. where the sets were decorated with dozens of poinsettia plants. Poinsettias became their winter cash-cow.Eventually, the Eckes’ closely guarded secret, the grafting technique, was discovered and published in industry journals for competitive companies to replicate. Today the red plants are a holiday mainstay and although the Ecke family no longer has a monopoly on the market they are still the major producers of poinsettias in the USA.