Poignant Poinsettia

Mark Griffiths on the extraordinary story of human sacrifice, secret agents and international shenanigans behind the Christmas bestseller

- Mark Griffiths

NOW, botany,’ said my host, ‘I reckon it would be first-class cover. Good excuse for being in bad places. Get the act right and the locals would think you were just another barking gringo or gweilo obsessed with their stupid weeds.’ I was tempted to point out that several of his fellow professionals, far from acting, had been serious devotees of botany, but it seemed uncivil to cloud what my host plainly thought was his blue-sky thinking. We were at his club, after all, and he was paying for my pre- Christmas lunch. So I mentioned none of these men who’d taken advantage of their careers in diplomacy and espionage to travel in search of plants—not even the American whose great botanical coup was doing its best at that very moment to bring seasonal cheer to the drab dining room.

His name was Joel Roberts Poinsett and each of his foreign postings was an opportunity to explore a new flora and collect plants for his garden in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1825, at the age of 46, he was appointed the first US ambassador to Mexico. It was in the third winter of this five-year mission that he encountered a species that would make its breeders rich and his name immortal.

He’d gone to Taxco in the southern mountains to investigate the local silver mines that had raised this fine city to glory. There, he found a different treasure. It was a shrub with slender, sparsely branched stems to about 8ft tall. At their summits, golden bead-like florets were encircled by large leafy bracts of a texture more luxurious and a scarlet more vivid than he’d ever witnessed before in Nature.