I. DISCOVERY 

Sunbeams pour through dusty panes and insects flutter against the glass. I hear chattering sparrows and the crunch of gravel as I enter a room filled entirely with plants surging upwards several feet, reaching towards the highest windows of the greenhouse. They have lean, expansive vines with scarlet star-shaped leaves at their tips, ascending in an explosion of height and colour. The form of the leaves looks familiar, but I’m not sure where I’ve seen them before. I ask the National Trust guide what the plant is called. She replies “Euphorbia Pulcherrima” with a rolling of rs, “or you might know it better as ‘Poinsettia.’”

Both myself and the young people I am taking on this tour are confused.

“You mean the Christmas plant?” one of the group asks. Yes, the guide tells us – and indigenous to the forests of southern Mexico.

I am at Tyntesfield, a grand neo-Gothic mansion and gardens, refashioned to its current design for the merchant William Gibbs in the mid-19th century, with the spoils of the lucrative guano trade. This business saw indentured Chinese labourers work in the perilous conditions of the Chincha Islands off Peru’s coast, extracting the faeces of boobies, pelicans and guanay cormorants. This was then shipped across the Western world for use as fertiliser as industrial agriculture reached its zenith. I am here working on a participatory arts project with a group of young people from nearby Bristol, where we are exploring the gaps and silences in the official colonial archives of the house, looking instead for the stories of the workers, animals and plants who make up the buried history of the house: those whose voices have long been erased from the official accounts. 

Guano is the trade name for bird droppings, which were exported to the UK for use as fertisiler due to their high nitrogen, phosphate and potassium content. As a Victorian music hall ditty ran at the time, “William Gibbs made his dibs / From the turds of foreign birds.”

My first encounter at Tyntesfield with this wild(er) poinsettia, compared to the more familiar indoor potted plant almost ubiquitous at Christmastime, connects me to a wider story of the plant that reaches into the heart of imperial botany. The plant takes its English name from the US ambassador to Mexico in the early 19th century, Joel Roberts Poinsett. Poinsett was a plantation owner, high-ranking US politician, and colonial privateer who advanced US interests in Latin America. Yet he is more widely known today through his role as an amateur botanist and his namesake specimen.

The story of this plant will take me from this grand house in Somerset, a few miles away from where I live in Bristol in the southwest of England, to the remote Chincha islands off Peru. From here the story travels to the dry tropical forests of southern Mexico, before heading north to the plantations and greenhouses of Poinsett’s South Carolina and beyond, across the world, where it is now one of the most economically profitable commercial crops in the history of the United States, globally shipped for use as a Christmas decoration.

In Mexico, prior to the arrival of gunpowder and diseases with Cortes and the Spanish, the plant was known as cuetlaxōchitl in Nahautl language and in Huastec (Téenek) Maya as k’alul wits. Cuetlaxōchitl was deemed a sacred plant by the Mexica (the people sometimes called Aztec) and extracts of the brightly coloured leaves were used to dye cloth. The plant was so revered by Mexica rulers that thousands of the plants were transported to the capital city of Tenochtitlan each year. For the Mexica, the plant also carried healing properties: they used its milky sap (or latex) for medicinal purposes and despite Spanish attempts to erase evidence of indigenous rituals and practices, surviving records have shown the plants were used for sacred ceremonies, such as Tlaxochimaco, a festival dedicated to Huitzilopochtli, the god of war, associated with the sun. The centrality of cuetlaxōchitl to both spiritual and medicinal practices in its indigenous landscape is a far cry from the purely decorative and economic use of the plant in the US today.

With the 16th-century Spanish invasion, however, missionaries renamed the plant flor de nochebuena – the flower of the Holy Night (or Christmas Eve) – as part of Christmas rituals when decorating churches and nativity scenes, in those very earliest days of its colonial association with Christianity.

In Motswana poet Tjawangwa Dema’s “Nationhood for the Domesticated” she embarks on a polyvocal exploration of the imagined boundaries between human and non-human. This is a convergence that happens in language, “All false cognate / all false friend”, a false friend being a word in one language that looks – duplicitously – like another.

Three hundred years later, a wily American with coiffured hair and a tailored broadcloth woollen jacket comes across the vivid scarlet leaves of the plant framing a nativity scene in southern Mexico, where he has recently been made the first US ambassador to the newly independent republic. The man looks around to check he is alone amongst the oozing candles and intricately carved stable, before surreptitiously cutting several samples of the flower. He hastily sends back his cuttings to his estate in South Carolina. Within a few years, this flor de nochebuena, or “Mexican flame flower” as it was otherwise known to contemporary English-speakers in Mexico, gained some prominence in flower shows and horticultural journals, which often credit this American ambassador Joel Roberts Poinsett with its “discovery”. By 1836, the Scottish botanist Robert Graham had labelled the plant “poinsettia”, continuing the 18th-century colonial legacy of naming newly taxonomised plants after prominent colonial officials. The name has stuck ever since.

Joel Roberts Poinsett (1779–1851) was an investor, plantation owner, secret US agent in Latin America, amateur botanist and member of the political elite. As Secretary of War in the 1830s, he oversaw the genocidal “Trail of Tears” which forcibly displaced the Cherokee people from their lands in what is now the state of Georgia to reservations in the west on a death march following the discovery of gold in the late 1820s. Poinsett’s story is also in dialogue with the stories the young people and I are exploring back in Tyntesfield, Somerset, in the way his colonial ambitions are entirely bound up with the questions of sovereignty and independence across Latin America. Ten years prior to his “discovery” of the “Poinsettia” in the 1820s, Poinsett helped orchestrate the Chilean War of Independence in order to counteract British power in South America and further US interests. As ambassador to Mexico, he attempted to acquire Texas from Mexico and aggressively developed US interests through organising Masonic lodges which cultivated pro-American factions within Mexico. In his book, Notes on Mexico, Made in the Autumn of 1822, the slave-owning Poinsett argues that Mexicans were “fully capable of republican self-governance, but only if white Creoles maintained their superior place at the pinnacle of the social order.” Unsurprisingly, Poinsett became deeply unpopular in the new Mexican state, to the extent that “poinsettismo” became a term used to characterise meddling and disruptive US behaviour in Mexican politics.

Poinsett’s story interweaves with the story of William Gibbs and Tyntesfield in other ways. He was a key advocate of the use of guano as fertiliser, as well as expanding the scale of agroindustry, drawing on his advocacy for the plantation economy. This is an economy which requires both plants and people to be detached from their indigenous land and communities. These two pioneers of industrial farming and fertiliser also laid the crucial groundwork for some of the most severe and devastating sources of carbon emissions in our contemporary world. Yet Poinsett’s appalling political legacy is far more neglected than the politically neutralising celebration of his name for the beloved Christmas flower, alongside his oft-vaunted role as founding member of the Smithsonian Museum.

Poinsett’s life, work and political worldview, however, make him a prototypical agent of the Plantationocene, a concept and mode of organisation the transspecies thinker Donna Haraway has described as consisting of “radical simplification; substitution of peoples, crops, microbes and life forms; forced labour; and, crucially, the disordering of times of generation across species, including human beings.”

Elsewhere, in TJ Dema’s “Prologue Hypothesis”, the poet further explores borders, movement and colonial legacies of language: Here is the line between man and man/and nature/Man-made/As all false boundaries are.  The line breaks and repetition cleave “man” from “nature”, whilst showing the artificial nature of these human-imposed borders and the many ways in which the more-than-human constantly exceeds these “false boundaries”.

Derived from the European slave plantations in the Americas from the 17th century onwards, the Plantationocene organisations Haraway describes continue today, through globalised factory meat production, monocrop agribusiness, and the vast substitutions of crops such as oil palms for multispecies forests. Poinsett was himself a plantation owner, and his white supremacist beliefs enjoyed very real leverage and devastation. This manifested both in terms of the African people enslaved and exploited on his plantation in South Carolina and the Cherokee people who suffered genocide during his tenure as Secretary of War, as well as his agroindustrial farming innovations such as the industrial use of guano and its corresponding ecological devastation to the landscapes of the Chincha islands and the indentured Chinese labourers forced to work there. Just as his plantations required the displacement of indigenous people from Africa and the Caribbean, his displacement of cuetlaxōchitl from its indigenous landscape to the behemoth of globalised plant production it is today is a pertinent example of the Plantationocene.

It was in the 20th century, however, that the Plantationocene of the poinsettia as vast monocrop agribusiness took proper root, with the cultivation of the plant into potted decoration by Albert Ecke.

II. CULTIVATION

Albert Ecke and his family made a trip to California at the turn of the 20th century, from which they intended to cross the Pacific to Fiji and open a health spa. Enamoured by the economic opportunity in California, they began growing for the cut flower market with chrysanthemums, gladiolus and poinsettias. The latter’s popularity spurred them to farm poinsettias alone by 1909. At this point, however, the plant was yet to be successfully potted, or sold live.

A decade later, this changed as Paul Ecke Sr. became head of the family business and developed a unique grafting technique. This involved combining rarer, more densely-branched cultivars with more common and sparsely-branched cultivars, ensuring each seedling would branch, and therefore resulting in a bushier, more uniform, more commercially appealing, and easily containable plant. The poinsettia had been potted.

Due to their top-secret technique, the Eckes had a monopoly on commercialising the plant for much of the 20th century. In many contemporary articles on the history of poinsettia, the language used to speak about this transformation is deeply telling. One Los Angeles Times article describes the grafting technique’s metamorphosis of the plant as “a secret breeding technique [which] turned the delicate and gangly weed into a sturdy and voluptuous potted plant.” The description of the wild poinsettia as a “gangly weed,” akin to the one I encountered in the greenhouse of Tyntesfield, compared with the more economically profitable “sturdy” and “voluptuous” potted plant speaks volumes for the Western extractivist understandings of the more-than-human. “Voluptuous” acts as an objectifying mask for feminised desirability, “weed” as unruly and wild, a term deeply fraught when it comes to discussion of an indigenous plant displaced through US colonial interference. In another example of this taming move, a recent YouTube advert by Dümmen Orange, the largest plant breeding and propagating company in the world, displays a manager standing in front of row after row of subtly different poinsettias in an immense greenhouse. The manager guides the viewer through various cultivars, indicating those varieties that have the greatest “control” and “vigour”. Here the plant is eroticised and contained. These linguistic moves follow the colonial logic of progress from weed to potted plant, but also replicate in botanical terms the pacification performed by colonial powers to “pot” the colonised into subservience. In this respect, colonial progressivism casts a long shadow over contemporary language, demonstrating myriad ways in which the history of plants and people are still entangled through being sexualised and controlled.

In her collection Incubation: A Space for Monsters (Prototype, 2023), Bhanu Kapil develops a radical and hybrid form to explore the figure of the monster: “She finds each forest in turn and enters it as a test of desire. It is radical desire but, unable to stop feeling what she came there to feel, she can’t stop and now she is in the thick part of the country stumbling over the roots.” The collection examines histories of migration and the manifold and contradictory impulses of a sense of home, a sense of her roots, and the ‘forest’ of the body and memory.

The writer Daisy Lafarge identifies the “florification of female sexuality” in 19th-century imperial botany, whereby white women’s bodies served as models of passivity, drawing analogies to colonial botany’s cultivation and containment of “exotic” eroticised flowers. Here gender and race intersect in this depiction of plants, whereby patriarchal ideals of white femininity as passive and beautiful were transposed onto plants deemed containable, exemplified by cultivated roses becoming synonymous with passive beauty. In contrast, “wilder” plants (or weeds) native to the tropics were synonymised with sexual aggression and unruliness, which mirrored the racial and sexual stereotypes applied to non-white women by colonial patriarchy.

Colonial plant taxonomy was a hegemonising project, spearheaded by Carl Linnaeus, who developed an empirical method for naming species and an ideal taxonomy of pure and fixed biological forms with humans at the privileged centre. This botanical essentialism, Lafarge argues, was used as proof of a natural social and sexual order, underpinned by patriarchal and heteronormative ideas of monogamy. Within this framework, plant forms that could be controlled and contained were revered, and were associated with whiteness and “pure” femininity, whereas plant forms that refused tidy categorisation and easy cultivation were depicted as monstrous and rebellious. This was transposed to racist and sexist ideas of non-white people who needed to be contained. This essentialism, as the LA Times article conveys, persists today through the idea of potting an indigenous weed through mono-species farming, and connects to the Plantationocene’s emphasis on radically reduced species systems.

Yet this enduring colonial articulation of how plants such as the poinsettia are described and thought about in the Plantationocene has been largely smoothed over through its association with Christmas. This is a legacy that was greatly developed through the cultivation of the plant by the Ecke family across the 20th century.

Paul Ecke Jr. consolidated the commercialisation of the plant from the mid-to-late 20th century, through a marketing strategy which made the plant analogous with Christmas. He inundated television networks with free poinsettias, sending planes full of potted plants across the US,  promoting their seasonal appeal on programmes like The Tonight Show and Bob Hope’s Christmas specials, facilitating the poinsettia’s rise to the bestselling potted plant in the US, with 100 million sold each year in only six weeks. It is specifically this benign association of the poinsettia as a beloved Christmas plant which has ensured that its namesake’s brutal history and the Plantationocene that lies at the heart of the plant’s cultivation has been occluded.

This relentless commercial cultivation has reached its nadir in the excesses of 21st-century plant breeding and globalised agro-industry.

III.BREEDING

Prior to the late 1980s, the Ecke family all but monopolised the poinsettia industry. Yet this dramatically changed when university researcher John Dole managed to hack the grafting technique and published his findings. This broke the Ecke monopoly, leading to a period of massive proliferation of plant producers. Yet, in a gross irony, this also led to the neo-colonial and neoliberal outsourcing of plant production and labour back to Latin America. This exploitative outsourcing has only expanded further today, undercutting costs due to lower labour prices in Latin America, ruining both land and people, in a mirror of the deindustrialisation and offshoring of labour production that took place across much of Europe and America in the late 20th century. Out of sight, out of mind. The poinsettia has returned home to Latin America, but less emancipated and more contained than ever.

The depressed prices of the 1990s onwards have opened the market to discount stores and outlets like Home Depot in an ever-increasing scramble for cheaper prices. Cuttings are freighted from Latin America into the US and Europe, where they are rooted and plants are “finished” by growers before selling to consumers in supermarkets and garden centres.

The Plantionocene of poinsettia cultivation has reached new absurdities as it crosses borders through globalised trade. Demand for novelty and new cultivars has led to extreme R&D processes in temperature-controlled greenhouses and laboratories with increasingly experimental poinsettias. Now researchers line up amid rows of petri dishes and beakers to pursue poinsettia IVF. Retailers demand novelty poinsettias that add value and interest. New cultivars bloom with titles like Ice Punch, Freedom Peppermint, Polar Bear, I Luv U and Golden Glo. Experimental cultivars are sent to a “torture chamber” that tests how they might survive cargo, retailers and neglectful owners. The plants are overwatered, left to dry out, exposed to extreme temperatures and dropped from heights to test their strength.

In TJ Dema’s “Commons”, appetite and consumption become metaphor for the rapacious pursuit of profit demanded by the colonial claim of possession and private property, the repetition creating an effect as if the language is swallowing itself, reflecting the self-destruction of colonial greed, “only man, only man devours devouring”.

This is commercial agro-farming on steroids. Plantationocene thinking demands that indigenous people and indigenous plants be displaced and alienated from their places of origin in order to produce goods for global commerce. The plantation is a site of mono-simplification and the discipline of people and plants. In the experimental laboratories of contemporary poinsettia production, the plants are taken to further extremes. Dispossessed from their indigenous context 200 years ago, they return, potted and contained, to be worked by exploited indigenous workers and mauled through torture chambers before being shipped around the world and disposed of after the Christmas period. There is a through-line across this history of dispossession and potting, whereby Poinsett’s original accumulation through dispossession is constantly renewed through the ever-expanding cultivation of the plant. The displacement of indigenous peoples from their ancestral connections in which Mexica polities treated the plant as sacred and developed communal rituals of worship, is an integral part of the severance across time, space and generations that lies at the heart of the Plantationocene. Now, indigenous workers cultivate row after row of the plant in humid industrial greenhouses, enduring brutal conditions for appallingly low pay, whilst phenomenal profits are raked in by distant American and European business leaders. Two centuries after his aggressive agro-industrial innovations, Poinsett’s plantation experiments have propagated far beyond even his most profitable, imperial, dreams. Yet amidst this rampant propagation, pathogens lie in wait.

The plantation monocrop creates the availability of vast resources of food for pathogens and pests, as Haraway outlines elsewhere in her discussion of the Plantationocene. The global reach of poinsettia production, involving the transit of plants back and forth across the globe, creates hybridisations across pathogenic species, which cultivates incredibly virulent new pathogens. Furthermore, the intensity of poinsettia propagation and the warmth, wet and humidity of their vast warehouses creates conditions that further develop susceptibility to fungal, bacterial and parasitic disease. Yet one genus of bacteria, phytoplasma, is deliberately infected within commercially grown plants to keep them compact, contained and bushy. Researchers have described this as the first phytoplasma that has “economically advantageous” traits. Economic gain is pursued through the genetically modified restriction of its natural growth and spread, keeping the plant potted in its place, and riven with disease, for the purpose of global trade.

The manifold offshoots of ‘pot’, etymologically speaking, offer interesting insight into its increasingly imperial connotations across the ages.

POT (n)“deep, circular vessel,” from late Old English pott and Old French pot “pot, container, mortar” (also in erotic senses)

POT HUNTER (n)“one who shoots whatever he finds; one who hunts or fishes for food or profit not for sport, one who kills regardless of the season, waste of game, or pleasure involved,” 1781.

POTSHOT (n)also pot-shot, 1836, “shot taken at animal simply to ‘get it in the pot,’” that is, not for sport or marksmanship and with little heed paid to the preservation of the animal.

POT PLANT: (n)by 1816 as “plant grown in a pot.”

Tucked between the Black and Pee Dee Rivers, at the end of a narrow stretch of sandy road framed by drooping, lichen-covered oak trees, stand the remains of the White House Plantation that Poinsett called home, just outside Georgetown, South Carolina. There are two brick chimneys standing aloof, and a recently renovated “Overseer’s cottage”, used as a base for duck and dove hunting. The contemporary renovation work is described by the architecture firm Goggans as a “timeless representation of the South Carolina Lowcountry vernacular”. The grand white plantation house, however, which would have been framed by illustrious white columns, expansive porch and surrounded by carefully tended decorative gardens, and was 200 years ago one of the centres of global rice plantation commerce, was apparently burnt to rot and rust by a fire at the start of the 20th century.

Elsewhere in South Carolina, on the main street in Greenville, a plaque dedicated to Poinsett celebrates his “distinguished career”, defining him as a “Planter. Writer. Botanist. Diplomat. Statesman”, whereby his “cultural interests and scientific pursuits” earned him the title “versatile American”.

Poinsett is long gone, his plantation turned to rust and ruin and dirt, as all empires will eventually be returned to soil. Yet the smoothing over of his legacy and erasure of his atrocities has very real dangers, preparing the way for the horrors of the colonial past to return in zombie-like forms in our present day. In the age of Trump, Farage, Meloni and their kind, white supremacist dreams always come laced with imperial nostalgia. Poinsett has been bestowed a benign legacy through his association with the beloved Christmas plant and as custodian of the Smithsonian Museum. Yet beyond this, he was crucial to the emergence of modern American capitalist state, in all its colonial brutality and reach, incriminated in the persistence of the plantation economy and a chief pioneer in the emergence of the agro-industrial global complex.

The artist Nell Irvin Painter, writing about the historical work of Saidiya Hartman, asserts that the “past changes according to what questions we ask […] the archive is a living, moving thing.” Back at Tyntesfield, the young group and myself are spending the afternoon poring over the National Trust archives of colonial botany, the guano trade, numerical records of servants and animal hunts, alongside vital, anti-colonial contemporary poetry that is deeply engaged with the relationships between plants and humans, such as that by Tjawangwa Dema and Bhanu Kapil. The young people are creating collages and found poems drawn from these histories; the poinsettia has proven particularly compelling to the group. Amidst the scratching of pens against paper, the cut of scissors and the smearing of glue, we are talking together about how the history of plants is inextricably connected to the history of people, or as Painter would have it, is a “living, moving thing”. The reclaiming of the weeds and wildness of the history of cuetlaxōchitl can be part of a process of resistance against the capitalist juggernaut of the Plantationocene. The histories must be revisited, complexified, rewilded, unpotted, in order that we might find a more radical grammar of weeds. .