Illustration by Britt Spencer
1,664,000 poinsettias sold in 2015 by 31 illinois producers, with a value of $8.3 million, according to the USDA.
What? The ubiquitous crimson-leafed hothouse plant synonymous with the holidays might have roots here? I’d never heard of such a connection. Neither, it turns out, had the folks at the Missouri Botanical Garden or the Missouri History Museum.
The only authoritative mention I could find online was a two-sentence entry on the United States Botanic Garden’s website under the Latin name Euphorbia pulcherrima: “This was the poinsettia grown throughout the United States and Europe until around 1920. It was first marketed as the St. Louis red poinsettia by Louis Bourdet of St. Louis, Missouri, around 1924.”
That’s it. So if the St. Louis red was supposedly the poinsettia grown all over the country and in Europe, how is it that no St. Louisan seems to know about it?
I began digging. Eventually I reached Pat Bellrose, who runs Fahr Greenhouse & Garden Center in Wildwood. Bellrose, a self-proclaimed history nerd, says the poinsettia, a native of Mexico, has been cross-pollinated and hybridized dozens of times since first being introduced here in the early 1800s. He’d never heard of Louis Bourdet, and there are between 1,500 and 1,800 types of the plant. Nonetheless, Bellrose says, he had come across the St. Louis red in his research.
The way that Bellrose describes the variety, we would hardly recognize it as a poinsettia today. Its bracts—the red structures that we think of as the blooms but are actually modified leaves—were much smaller and less distinctive than those on today’s popular poinsettias. But those modest-sized bracts were apparently a most immodest shade of red. “This was a true cardinal red poinsettia,” he says. “Hey, maybe that’s where it got its name.”
David Trinklein, a plant sciences professor under whom Bellrose studied at the University of Missouri–Columbia, isn’t so sure. Trinklein says research surrounding the St. Louis red is so murky, he can’t be sure of much of anything beyond confirming its existence. But the professor thinks he can surmise what happened to it: In the 1930s and ’40s, as methods of hybridization improved, the poinsettia’s popularity exploded, making it one of America’s top planted crops. The trend was toward bigger, broader red bracts. If the St. Louis red had indeed been the “it” Christmas plant in the 1920s, this showier new poinsettia probably stole the spotlight.
“Whenever these varieties disappear,” Trinklein says, “it’s because there’s no more interest in people buying them.”
