Poinsettias and Profits

Leon: Last month Ed wrote most of the article about wines, so it is my time to celebrate the Christmas season. We have already done two or more articles on poinsettias, but there is a lot to say about this plant, and I like poinsettias. (Ed knows a lot more about growing poinsettias than I do, but he will correct my errors.)

I will begin with the pretty good news and move on to things that are a bit discouraging. Back in the thirties and forties the market offered a few varieties that weren’t very good and were fairly expensive. This year we will have much wider selections with colors ranging from white to purple to yellow to shades of red and some mixtures. You might want to visit the Burden Center on Essen Lane in Baton Rouge to admire the thousand plants in forty varieties that will be on display on December 2 from 8 am until noon.  The collection includes varieties that will be available to commercial growers next year, but the plants will be available for public purchase at attractive prices.

Now we should move on to the pretty good or not so good news. Poinsettias are difficult to grow because they are sensitive to fertilizer levels, day length and greenhouse temperatures—particularly if the grower expects to have plants at their peak for the Christmas season. Because of this the grower will have about five dollars invested in each good quality plant and about three dollars for each of the smaller plants. Those are actual costs, without any profit at all. Around early November, each grower is looking at market outlets and at the prices being offered.

Economic times are hard and retailers know they will need to price the plants very low if they are going to make many sales. Besides that, the retailers have to consider their own costs. Poinsettias have brittle stems and must be handled carefully. Also, the plants must be on display where customers will move them around—and break a few more stems. It seems that most retailers will consider poinsettias as loss leaders—plants that are sold below actual cost in order to get customers into the store so they will buy other items as well. This is good news for us as consumers but the wholesale prices that growers are being offered means that most of them will lose money on the crop—selling for below their cost of production. This doesn’t mean the children will go hungry. Growing greenhouse plants is a year-round business. The poinsettias will be cleared out well before Christmas, and production for spring plants will begin. That will probably yield a profit, and growers will start growing other plants as summer crops.

I grew up during the Great Depression and still remember the old expression: “Well, times are hard.”  Friends, times are hard again. Nobody really knows what the Christmas sales will be like but they aren’t going to be boom times. Enjoy the poinsettias this year and don’t worry about next Christmas—nobody knows just what will happen. Growing plants —horticultural or agronomic—is and always has been a gamble. It always rains when you don’t want it to, or there is an early freeze or a late one. Then there are pests—diseases, insects and weeds that may or may not be a problem. Those problems are usually related to weather or to the unpredictable cycles of insect populations. And things like that happen even during good economic times.

So, will we have plenty of inexpensive poinsettias next year? Probably not. Most of the large-scale poinsettia growers have opted out. But listen to the good news! The Grinch can’t steal Christmas by getting rid of poinsettias. Nobody seems to remember just when poinsettias came to represent Christmas, or why. Ed says that growers started selling a few not-very-good plants in the thirties and forties. I remember seeing a few poinsettias back in the fifties, and they seemed to become popular in Baton Rouge during the sixties. Before that, we had holly branches, evergreen vines and some white Easter lilies that we called Christmas lilies. There were some beautiful “Christmas Cherries,” pepper plants with bright red fruits. Hardly anyone bought Christmas trees that were shipped in from the far north. We went into the woods and found a pretty good pine tree or, with luck, found a holly tree—full of bright red berries.

Christmastide is also the winter solstice. The days will start to be longer, the weather will get much colder, but spring will come. We are into hard times now and no one can predict the future. There is an old expression that fits all times: “This too, will pass.” Enjoy the beautiful poinsettias this year, enjoy the wonders of Christmas and look forward to better times. Try to remember the old Johnny Mercer song: “Spread joy up to the maximum, bring gloom down to the minimum, have faith or pandemonium’s liable to walk into the scene.”

Ed O’Rourke, Jr. and Leon Standifer love gardening even when it’s not profitable and are the authors of Gardening in the Humid South (LSU Press, 2002).