A group in Charleston supported by artist Jonathan Green is slowly planning an ambitious international celebration of the poinsettia to show how its global popularity as a vibrant holiday plant is rooted in the Holy City.
The Poinsettia Bicentennial International Celebration 2028 will culminate during the 200th anniversary of the flower’s debut in the United States, organizers said.
They seek to partner with communities across the country and globally to tell the poinsettia’s expansive story intertwined with the complex legacy of Charleston-native Joel Roberts Poinsett, for whom the plant is named.
Poinsett was involved in many of the U.S. government’s major domestic and foreign policy decisions in the early 1800s while he served four American presidents. He also was a secret U.S. agent who supported Chile’s war for independence. As secretary of war, he oversaw the removal of Native Americans west along the Trail of Tears.
He was a botanist who helped to establish the Smithsonian Institution. When Poinsett was America’s first ambassador to Mexico, he sent the plant in 1828 to South Carolina, placing it on a path to become an international sensation.
He was also a trustee at the College of Charleston, president of the Charleston Library Society and a founder of the S.C. Historical Society.
“He touched almost everything you can think of, federal, state and local,” said Kim Cliett Long, project administrator of the Jonathan Green Maritime Cultural Center at the University of South Carolina Beaufort.
Organizers hope the project will spark conversations around Poinsett’s celebrated yet complicated career and life, she said. The planning group in Charleston is waiting for this year’s observance of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution to end before they pick up the pace for the poinsettia celebration, Long added.
How it started
The idea for the project emerged in November 2024 when Long and Green were in Mexico City where the poinsettia grows to tree size. It was once used for medicinal purposes, cosmetics and to dye textiles.
Long said she and Green learned how negatively Mexicans feel about the misappropriation of the plant that was later cultivated into an inexpensive pot-sized variety for international sales.
Long said she conceived of the idea of the celebration coupled with a traveling art exhibit, and Green supports it.
The Long-curated traveling exhibit, which includes two of Green’s original works of art, was the project’s opening salvo. The exhibit was on display at the Charleston County Main Library, and it recently closed at the Charleston Library Society.
It is scheduled to emerge again in late March at the USC Beaufort cultural center before it travels the world, Long said.
A former mayor gets involved
Poinsett married into a family that enslaved people at the White House Plantation at the confluences of the Black and Pee Dee rivers in Georgetown County. Peter Poinsett was enslaved there, Long said. He was the father of civil rights icon Septima Poinsett Clark, who the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called the mother of the civil rights movement.
“The main point of the art exhibit is to show the remarkable transition” in one generation from Poinsett’s enslavement to Clark’s civil rights leadership, Long said.
Long recruited former Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg to help plan the project and raise money for it. Tecklenburg said he was aware of Poinsett’s connection to the plant, but he was surprised to learn of the ties between Poinsett and Clark.
When he stood at the podium in the council chamber at City Hall, Tecklenburg said he saw Poinsett’s portrait to his right on a wall and Clark’s portrait to his left. The relationship between Poinsett and Clark is “a great story of history” that led him to read Poinsett’s biography, Flowers, Guns, and Money: Joel Roberts Poinsett and the Paradoxes of American Patriotism.
Poinsett’s life and varied career, he said, is a synopsis of early American history. Tecklenburg said he was also surprised to learn that Poinsett, a staunch federalist, was involved in the anti-nullification movement in the 1830s that stopped South Carolina from breaking away from the Union. The state, however, did so three decades later, leading to the Civil War.
A withering Mexican flower
In Mexico, the plant has several names, including “cuetlaxóchitl,” meaning “a flower that withers,” according to a Library of Congress story that explains Poinsett’s connection with the plant.
Poinsett sent specimens of the plant to Philadelphia botanist Robert Buist, who exhibited it for the first time at a flower show in 1829. The following year, he introduced the plant in Europe and proclaimed it “Euphorbia Poinsettia” in honor of Poinsett. Over time, admirers of the plant shortened its name to “poinsettia.” Poinsett died Dec. 12, 1851, before the plant achieved commercial success.
In the 19th century, The Vatican began using the ubiquitous Mexican flowers as Christmas decorations and then all Catholic churches adopted it as a holiday plant.
In the early 20th century, Albert Ecke, a German immigrant and commercial grower in Encinitas, Calif., and later his son, Paul, are said to be responsible for further elevating the plant’s mass cultivation and appeal.
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