Poinsettia Plant Patents — Jocelyn Bosse

How did the poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima) become a symbol of the Christmas holiday in the United States? This is a story about plant patents, trade secrets, and a broken monopoly. A shorter version of this story was shared as a Twitter thread (2021-12-20)

Joel Roberts Poinsett (1779–1851), from Wikimedia

Poinsettias are famous for their brightly coloured leaves or “bracts” (not flowers!), which range from the popular red to pink, orange, creamy-white, variegated, and many shades of green. The plant is native to Mexico and Central America and flowers in the winter. It is also known by the Aztec name, cuetlaxochitl (kwet-la-sho-she). The Aztecs had cultivated the plant and used it for decoration, dyes, and medicine from its sap, long before the 16th century. But with the colonisation of the Americas, when missionaries began to spread Catholicism to the Indigenous communities of Mexico, they used the cuetlaxochitl plant to decorate Nativity scenes and the plant also became known as “flor de la noche buena” or “Nochebuena” or “Christmas Eve flower”.

The common name “poinsettia” refers to Joel Roberts Poinsett, who was the US Ambassador to Mexico (1825–1829), as well as a slave owner. It is widely believed that he sent cuttings of poinsettia to his greenhouses in South Carolina and began propagating the plant, which was then popularised after a display at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s flower show in June 1829. However, there is little evidence that he actually helped bring the plant to the United States.

The plant name isn’t Poinsett’s only legacy: as a diplomat, he was seen as a meddler in Mexican affairs, and so Mexicans coined the word “poinsettismo” to characterise his intrusive or imperious meddling behaviour. One remnant of his reputation seems to be the widespread belief amongst Mexican cuetlaxochitl growers that Poinsett devised a legal mechanism to prevent them from benefitting from cuetlaxochitl production; specifically, that he obtained a “patent” to prevent exports of poinsettia to the United States. However, no records have ever been found to support this, not least because the US patent laws did not include plants as eligible subject matter at the time.

Enter: the Plant Patent Act of 1930

Patents certainly began to play a role in the poinsettia story with the enactment of the Plant Patent Act of 1930. The first patent for a poinsettia was granted to Stephen M. Page (US Plant Patent 176, granted April 28, 1936, see below). It was a red poinsettia developed in Texas. But since then, nearly half (46% as at 2018) of the poinsettia patents were awarded to the Ecke family and their company.

Plant Patent 176, awarded to Stephen M. Page (left) and Plant Patent 242, awarded to Paul Ecke and named “Ruth Ecke” (right)

Ruth Vogel circled in red, from “Ecke-Maurer family and friends,” The Paul Ecke Ranch, Inc. Business Records and Family Papers (accessed December 19, 2021)

The Ecke family arrived in the United States from Germany in 1900, when Albert Ecke moved to Los Angeles, California, and established a dairy farm and a fruit orchard. He grew some poinsettias and and sold them from street stands. His son, Paul Ecke Snr, continued to expand the business and obtained many plant patents for poinsettia varieties.

Paul Ecke’s first plant patent for a poinsettia was a variety named “Ruth Ecke” (US Plant Patent 242, granted April 6, 1937, see above). It is unclear whom the variety was named after, but it was perhaps in honour of his sister-in-law, Ruth Vogel (see image, right).

His many plant patents also included:

“Variegated Ruth Ecke” (PP 336, granted August 8, 1939)
“Barbara Ecke Supreme” (PP 1,055, granted December 18, 1951)
“Ecke's White” (PP 1,802, granted January 20, 1959)

The family business then passed to Paul Ecke Jr, who promoted their plants by sending large numbers of poinsettias to the White House, popular television shows, and women’s magazines, which helped to make it a staple of talk shows, holiday programmes, and magazine shoot backdrops.

Images from Plant Patents 1,055 (“Barbara Ecke Supreme”), 1,802 (“Ecke's White”), and 336 (“Variegated Ruth Ecke”)

The Poinsettia Secret

In its native habitat, the poinsettia has an open, rather weedy habit, which makes it difficult to produce the dense potted plants with multiple flower-heads that are expected of ornamental plant varieties. For several decades, only the Ecke family knew a secret grafting technique to grow full and compact plants. During this period, they maintained a virtual monopoly on the poinsettia market.

However, Paul Ecke III recounts that “About two months after I bought the company, I open up a scientific journal, and there’s an article about some guy in Minnesota, a grad student, who stumbled upon this [grafting] technique, and he just published it for all the world to see – and it’s like, “Oh my god, that is not good news for me.”” “So that person figured it out, our trade secret.” The student was John Dole, who since became a horticulture professor at North Carolina State University. He published an article in 1988 and began giving talks about the grafting technique; “Paul Ecke III [was] not particularly happy about this development.” The Ecke poinsettia monopoly was broken, and growers around the world began producing compact poinsettias. In 2017, Paul Ecke assured NPR that he didn’t hold a grudge: “Doesn't matter to me anymore, but certainly caused me a little bit of grief.”

However, it is hard to take this “independent discovery” narrative entirely at face value, give that it leaves out an important detail: John Dole’s research papers in 1988 and 1992, which revealed the Ecke secret, disclose that he received research funding from the Paul Ecke company.

Poinsettia Day

Following the death of Paul Ecke Jr in 2002, the US House of Representatives nominated December 12 as “Poinsettia Day” (Res. 471) in his honour. The date was significant for being the anniversary of Joel Roberts Poinsett’s death. The resolution celebrates “the genetic work of the Ecke Ranch” which “are responsible for more than 80 percent of the world poinsettia market” and notes that “in 2001 poinsettias contributed $256,000,000 in sales at the wholesale level to the United States economy alone, and many times that amount to the economies of countries all over the world.”

In 2019, sales of poinsettias from the United States exceeded $154 million. The Ecke poinsettia business has since been sold to a Dutch company and their production had long since moved to Guatemala, though around 70% of all commercially grown poinsettia plants in the United States still originate from Ecke Ranch.