The deadly poinsettia myth began with a 1919 rumour
Many people believe a single poinsettia leaf can kill a child. It can't. The scare traces back to a 1919 urban legend, later repeated in a book and even an FDA newsletter. Researchers failed to find a toxic dose in rats, and a survey of over 20,000 poison-centre calls recorded no deaths.
The legend told of a two-year-old who died after eating a leaf. In 1944 the plant appeared in a book on poisonous plants of Hawaii, whose author later admitted the story was hearsay. Even so, a 1970 FDA newsletter warned that one leaf could be fatal, and in 1980 a North Carolina county banned poinsettias from nursing homes. Rat experiments reached doses equal to about 500 leaves without finding a lethal level. Of calls to American poison centres between 1985 and 1992, 92.4 percent reported no effect at all; swallowing the plant can cause stomach upset, and the sap can irritate skin or eyes in some people.
The red parts are not petals but leaves called bracts, which colour up through photoperiodism: they need at least fourteen hours of darkness a day for six to eight weeks, plus bright daylight. The true flowers are small yellow structures clustered in the centre. Wild plants are shrubs or small trees up to 4 metres tall, growing on Pacific-facing slopes from Mexico to southern Guatemala, in fragmented habitat under pressure from deforestation. An inland population in Guerrero is thought to be the ancestor of most cultivated plants.
The Aztecs grew them for medicine. The English name honours Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first American minister to Mexico, who sent plants to his South Carolina greenhouses from around 1826. Because of his role in slavery and the Trail of Tears, some now prefer the Nahuatl name cuetlaxōchitl. In Turkey the plant is called the Atatürk flower, after a dubious newspaper story.
Commercially it is a giant: about 70 million are sold in the United States in a six-week Christmas window, and one grower, Paul Ecke Ranch, supplies half the world market.
Source: Poinsettia
