Happy National Poinsettia Day!
Statues: The People They Salute
JOEL ROBERTS POINSETT, in 1825, while serving as the first U.S. Minister to Mexico brought back a beautiful plant called “flor de la noche buena” in Mexico (Flower of the Holy Night or Christmas Eve flower) In Chile and Peru, it is called the "Crown of the Andes", the Aztecs called the plant Cuitlaxochitl meaning "star flower" and in Spain it is known as Flor de Pascua or Pascua, (Easter Flower). They have also been called the lobster flower and the flame-leaf flower, due to the red color.
Poinsett was an amateur botanist and was able to propagate the plant. As you may have guessed, the beautiful bloom (actually the red is not a flower...it’s the leaves) was named Poinsettia for him.
Joel R. Poinsett would most likely have been surprised that his fame through the ages was for the plant he brought to America 😊 Poinsett was a U.S. Congressman for South Carolina and a Secretary of War under President Martin Van Buren.
Pictured is a statue of Joel R. Poinsett that is located in Greenville, South Carolina. December 12 is National Poinsettia Day, it is the day Joel Roberts Poinsett died in 1851.
Diana Erbio is a freelance writer and author of “Coming to America: A Girl Struggles to Find her Way in a New World”. Read more in her series Statues: The People They Salute visit The Table of Contents and the Facebook Page. (Please consider subscribing to this Substack for essays and the Blog Series about the subjects of statues in the National Statuary Hall Collection 😊🇺🇸🤓)
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Most interesting! You share the most amazing information! Thank you for your contributions.
Hmm... I need to get a poinsettia, the writer Robert Fulghum did a piece about the fact that they die but when you're ready to dispose of them they come back. 😮😯😲🙀They ARE tenacious little guys.