Poinsettias: how to grow and care for the Christmas plant | House & Garden

As inextricable from mass festive wares as tinsel and paper hats, the poinsettia blazes red in most shops and homes during December. Being such an omnipresent sight makes it unappealing for many of us, but, thankfully – if the standard scarlet species makes you wince – there are less common forms available that are well worth buying to brighten the house this Christmas.

Poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima) is a tender semi-evergreen shrub native to Mexico and Guatemala, where it grows in tropical dry forest, on hillsides and in steep canyons. In the wild, it can reach 4 metres tall as a large, leggy shrub or a small willowy tree. Its red ‘flowers’ are in fact leaf bracts – in the same way that the beautiful golden-green heads of garden euphorbias (such as E. characias subsp. wulfenii) are lime-coloured bracts that surround the tiny, insignificant-looking flowers. The Latin name for the red Christmas euphorbia (E. pulcherrima) means ‘the most beautiful euphorbia’, which anyone familiar with the golden-green likes of E. palustris may disagree with. E. pulcherrima should perhaps be renamed E. ubique, which translates as ‘the euphorbia that is everywhere’.

In its native Mexico, the snobbery that some of us harbour for the traditional crimson poinsettia, is not shared. The Aztecs revered the plant and cultivated it for dye, medicine, cosmetics, and decoration. In modern-day Mexico, it is known as flor de Nochebuena (Christmas Eve flower) because the star-shaped bracts represent the star of Bethlehem and their scarlet hue symbolises the blood of Christ. There is also a legend that an angel appeared to a girl called Pepita and told her to gather some weeds from the roadside and place them in front of the Christmas altar; upon doing