The making of a modern Christmas flower

Do you love or hate poinsettias? I’m in the latter camp, I have to confess. When it comes to Christmas, I prefer white to red – paperwhite narcissi, or hyacinths, or amaryllis, not lurid red horrors that sit glaring at you from the dining room table. And as for the salmon ones…
No, as far as I am concerned, there is nothing pulchritudinous about Euphorbia pulcherrima, even if its botanical name does mean “most beautiful of the euphorbias”. The only time I have ever warmed to the sight of a poinsettia was in Madeira, where you can see occasionally see them growing au naturel – huge, leggy shrubs six feet or more high, like supermodels wearing bright-red lipstick.
How was it, I wondered, that this architectural, rather rock’n’roll plant became transformed into a squat red blob, sulking its way through the height of our northern winter and featuring on a thousand Christmas cards?
The man we must blame is Joel Roberts Poinsett, a botanist and physician, who brought back the first poinsettia to the United States from Mexico, where he had been the equivalent of the first US ambassador.
Poinsett came from a wealthy Southern family, and travelled extensively in Europe, and especially Russia – where Tsar Alexander I tried to recruit him for the Russian civil service. He was elected to Congress in 1820 and was appointed first American Minister to Mexico (the precursor of ambassador) in 1825. On a visit to southern Mexico, he came across a flower known as the "Flor de Noche Buena" (Christmas Eve flower) and sent some cuttings back to his home in South Carolina.
Poinsettia had been associated in Mexico with the feast of Christmas since the 16th century, thanks to the legend of a poor Mexican girl/boy/family (depending on the version), who had no money to buy flowers to lay before the manger of the baby Jesus in the parish church on Christmas Eve.
There are several variations on the story, but the basic theme is that she/he/they decided to gather weeds from the roadside, thinking that at least this could provide a comfortable bed for the Saviour. As the stems were arranged around the figure of the baby, the weeds turned to brilliant red star-shaped flowers, symbolising the star of Bethlehem and the death of Christ.
Poinsett fell foul of the Mexican authorities, thanks to what they considered to be an uncontrollable and impertinent urge on his part to meddle in their business, and he took his leave of the country on 3 January 1830.
Although he gave his name to the plant, poinsettias are particularly associated in America with the Paul Ecke Ranch, based at Encinitas, California, the world’s largest and most successful poinsettia breeder. The Eckes began cultivating poinsettias in the 1900s, but the family business made a breakthrough in the 1960s, when Paul Ecke Jnr used cutting-edge technology –ie television – to bring his plants to a wider audience.
By grafting two varieties, the Eckes had turned the leggy wild poinsettia into the more compact plant we know today. However, Paul Jnr was determined to go further, and make poinsettias an obligatory part of the American Christmas experience.
He appeared on The Tonight Show and the Bob Hope Christmas Specials to promote his plants and ensure they were part of the sets. This piece of modern marketing paid off: poinsettias today are as much a part of the holiday season as evergreens and carols.
I’ve never been able to keep a poinsettia alive, so is this because I am an incompetent when it comes to looking after houseplants, or do they feel the hate vibes and keel over in response?
Leigh Hunt, principal horticultural advisor for the Royal Horticultural Society, was surprisingly sympathetic when I put this to him. “It’s a very common phenomenon – you get your poinsettia, it looks OK, you put it on the dining table on Christmas Eve and by Boxing Day it only has one bract left.
“Poinsettias need a minimum temperature of 13-15C. In most modern homes, that’s not going to be a huge problem in winter – so it’s probable that the plant has been shocked before it arrives in your house.
“If you’d bought the plant direct from the nursery where it had been grown in the right conditions, it would probably be all right. But what’s more likely is that it has been loaded on to Dutch trolleys and left standing outside the florist or in the garden centre in the cold. If it has been shocked before you get it, then trying to keep it looking good is going to be an uphill struggle.”
As a member of the Euphorbia family, poinsettia is related to some of the toughest, most adaptable plants on the planet. “Euphorbia is a highly successful and diverse group,” says Leigh, “and has adapted to all sorts of conditions. At one end of the scale there are euphorbias that look like cacti, while at the other are the cultivars that can be found in UK gardens, such as Euphorbia characias subsp wulfenii, with bright green leaves in spring.”
What look like big red flowers are actually bracts – modified leaves – while the flowers themselves are quite insignificant. Bracts, says Leigh Hunt, provide an economical way of advertising nectar over a long period of time. Red is often an indication that a plant is pollinated by birds, and because birds don’t have a strong sense of smell, these plants – including poinsettia – are usually odourless.
If you want to grow poinsettia, says Leigh, there are a few basics to remember.
Choose a position that gives good light, but not too much direct sun.
Choose a room that is consistently warm, and in which the temperature does not drop below 13C. A hall or a porch, where the temperature drops at night, may not be suitable.
Keep the plant moist, but not soggy. The thumb test is always the best – push your thumb into the surface of the soil, and if it feels dry, water.
Some poinsettia fans keep their Christmas plants going from year to year, cutting them back hard in April, and repotting them. They can grow to be quite sizeable plants, but the key thing, says Leigh, is to keep them out of artificial light as much as possible in autumn, so that they follow the natural pattern of shorter winter days. Otherwise, any new bracts will revert to plain green.

An admirer of abelia

There are many plants that boast many good points, yet somehow fail to make my heart beat faster. Abelia x grandiflora is one of these. It has glossy leaves that have shades of red and copper, it's semi-evergreen, it flowers for ages - from summer until late autumn - and while it makes a fairly big shrub, it doesn't make you feel as though it's trying to crowd you out of the garden. It's fluffy rather than forceful.

For me, however, it falls into the category of supporting act. While it may have fragrance, and look quite pretty, there's nothing really distinctive about it that would justify pulling it out of the corps de ballet, as it were, and raising it to the rank of ballerina.

A very quick flick through the multiplying piles of gardening books on my shelves (do they breed, do you think?) found only a couple of mentions. Stephen Lacey, in his very readable book Real Gardening, calls it "a stalwart background shrub of the season" (he's talking about autumn).

So I was astonished, when wandering round the Penelope Hobhouse garden at Wisley, to find that this despised Cinderella was the flamboyant beauty that had caught my eye as it frothed around a stone bench at the far end.

Of course, you need a large garden to give it this sort of treatment. But what an imaginative piece of planting. And what a sensible choice, given the long flowering period, the fragrance and the fact that you need to be up close to appreciate the pretty little trumpet flowers. Most people would go for roses, or something formal and evergreen, such as yew or perhaps choisya.

How nice to have one's prejudices turned upside down. And how wonderful to see this shrub flowering away in early December.

This is how the rest of the Hobhouse garden looked this week. As you can see, there's still lots of interest, even at this time of the year - thanks to the very mild autumn we've had in the south-east of the UK. I love the view of the mock Tudor brick chimneys in the distance. They give a rather cosy, domestic scale to the garden - although they actually belong to the laboratory building where the RHS plant pathology team are based.

Winter wonderland at Wisley

I haven't been feeling very well for the past few days, so this morning - my day 0ff - I decided that I needed a, some fresh air; b, to get away from everyone and c, to think about something other than work and what to buy at the supermarket.

So I switched off my phone, jumped in the car, and went to Wisley, the Royal Horticultural Society's garden in Surrey, which is about 25 minutes drive away.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Wisley. I love Wisley, but I hate having to share it with hordes of people. Unreasonable and intolerant, I know, but there you go. Today, it was busy. Very busy. There was a craft fair taking place this weekend, the existence of which had slipped my mind until I arrived in the overflowing car park. Dang!, I thought. (Except I didn't spell it that way.)

Anyway, my mission was to photograph the Tom Stuart-Smith borders around the Bicentenary Glasshouse, so I stomped off in search of autumnal vistas and other visual delights.

Wisley looks good at any time of year, but in autumn it can look spectacular. I'd never noticed before that from this angle, the fountain in the Long Pond echoes the shape of the tree in the distance. (Swamp cypress, perhaps?)

The cornus still have their leaves on, but you can see the bright stems underneath, which heightens the effect. This one is called 'Midwinter Fire' - and you can guess why.

The low light of winter makes rich colours, such as these pyracantha and holly berries, really glow. That's one of the great benefits of living this far north - the light is constantly changing, from season to season, from day to day, hour to hour. These colours might look garish in late spring or midsummer, but at this time of year, they are rich and jewel-like.

But even cool colours, such as the blue-green of these euphorbia, can light up the border, especially if placed next to spectacular autumn foliage, or this Yucca filamentosa 'Garland's Gold', with its intensely rich yellow variegation.

Anyway, to the Glasshouse borders. I'm fascinated by these. It's not often that we get the chance to see such a large area of planting take shape, from bare earth just four years ago, and this is a huge site - two hectares (or nearly five acres, in old money). The borders begin at the entrance to the Glasshouse, and sweep round to the western side, where there are two areas of prairie planting, designed by Professor James Hitchmough of Sheffield University.

At this time of year, the two blend seamlessly together, thanks to the extensive use of grasses and prairie-type perennials such as helenium, veronicastrum and echinacea in the Stuart-Smith borders.

Phlomis russeliana is another favourite, its seedheads popping up like exclamation marks above the misty hummocks of grass.

To me, this is clever, clever planting. Choosing plants that keep the structure of the borders going right into winter takes real skill. I just could not get tired of looking at it.

They look wonderful in summer of course - but late autumn allows you to see how the hummocks and humps of grasses - whether they are low-growing festuca or statuesque miscanthus - echo the billowing shapes of the trees and the landscape beyond.

The occasional explosion of orange beech leaves from the intermittent hedging around the lake picks up the vibrant foliage of a distant tree flaunting its autumn colours.

I tend, from time to time, to suffer from the delusion that I am the next Garden Photographer of the Year. Goodness knows why, because I only have a point-and-shoot, I have absolutely no idea what ISO stands for and the nearest I have come to photographic greatness is standing next to Derek St Romaine at the Chelsea Flower Show.

I love the process of going out and taking pictures of gardens, however, so I was really looking forward to my stint at Wisley today. I was down there last week, with my mother, when the Glasshouse borders were glittering and shimmering in the sunshine. Naturally, I'd forgotten my camera, so I'd vowed to go back as soon as I had a minute.

The weather, and my camera, had other ideas. I kept hoping the sun would break through, but it sulked behind a cloud for most of the morning. Whenever it looked like it might make an appearance, the dodgy battery in my camera would give up, at which point the air around me turned blue, and the sky remained resolutely grey.

Three times, I gave up and walked back round the gardens to the cafe in search of a cup of tea.

Three times the sun came out again just as I reached the cafe, at which point I scampered back to the Glasshouse borders (about half a mile away). Each time the sun disappeared by the time I got back there.

Eventually, the mummies with pushchairs - of which there are many at Wisley - were beginning to give me funny looks and tell their offspring to "hold onto the pram, darling". I think it was all the swearing.

Enough with the cute cat pictures!

Only kidding! Would I seriously ever say that? I couldn't resist posting these.

This is what you might call a Basket Case Study. It proves the immutable feline law that a cat in the vicinity of a box or basket will feel an irresistible urge to jump inside. Even if there is already another cat in it.

"The Paw you will always have with you." With apologies for misquoting the Gospel of St Matthew.

Designing with plants

Arranging plants in a garden is a bit like any creative endeavour. When you get it right, it looks effortless - but trying to get it right is a very different matter. I wrote a piece for The Independent Magazine this weekend, about this very problem and if you want to read it, here's the link.

I was interviewing two garden designers, Jill Anderson and Pamela Johnson, about their new book, called Planting Design Essentials.

As I say in the piece, many aspects of planting design deserve a whole book to themselves - colour, texture, finding the right plant for the right place and so on. But this is a good book to have at your elbow if you're planning a piece of planting, if only to make you more disciplined in your approach, and to help you think through the process in a simple, logical way.

Measuring the space, for example, before you go to the nursery or garden centre, will ensure that you come home with the right number of plants. If you find yourself succumbing to an impulse buy, as we all do, the book advises you to ask yourself some very tough questions about whether you have the right situation for this particular plant.

I've known Pamela Johnson for several years, and she is a valued member of my local gardening group - generous with her advice, and very good at making canapes! If you want to see what her own garden is like, go here.

For Craig

In memory of my darling husband, Craig Orr, who died three years ago today.

Perhaps if Death is kind, and there can be returning,
We will come back to earth some fragrant night,
And take these lanes to find the sea, and bending
Breathe the same honeysuckle, low and white.

We will come down at night to these resounding beaches
And the long gentle thunder of the sea,
Here for a single hour in the wide starlight
We shall be happy, for the dead are free

Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)