Poinsettia Competition

I learned a lot about orchids and breeders when I read the Orchid Thief. One of the main orchid-obsessed people in the book was Robert Fuchs, who apparently descended from Leonhart Fuchs, the guy they named the Fuchsia after. Today I read about the Ecke family that made the Poinsettia the king of Christmas plants.

The plant was brought to the United States in the late 1820s by the first U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Joel Roberts Poinsett.

Ecke was the first to develop the plant's commercial potential. He grew poinsettias on farmland in Hollywood and sold them from street stands. His son, Paul Ecke Sr., had bigger ideas.

A visionary horticulturist and businessman, Paul Ecke Sr. gave the poinsettia a makeover through a secret breeding technique that turned the delicate and gangly weed into a sturdy and voluptuous potted plant.

The Ecke family had a virtual monopoly on the world's poinsettia market largely because no one could figure out how they produced uniformly perfect plants with multiple branches emanating from a single stem - the "Ecke style."

Unfortunately for Ecke III, in 1992 a "university researcher published an article revealing his family's secret process. It wasn't pollination but rather the grafting of two types of poinsettias that created the desired plant from which cuttings were taken." Sounds like the competition has been fiercer and fiercer ever since.