Confessions of a ‘poinsettia killer’: Why is it so hard to keep holiday plants alive?
We received a lovely, mood-lifting holiday gift recently from dear friends Richard and Christine Greek: A dark red poinsettia plant.
The flip side, unfortunately, is that it’s now time for my sad, annual rite of folly, one I wrote about mournfully in 1997, right here in this very column.
“My name is Kathe, and I’m a poinsettia killer.”
I’m so ashamed.
Do you know how dreadfully depressing a potted poinsettia can look in July? Or even in January? Picture one long, thin stem with a couple of brown-edged, curled-up, pale green leaves. It’s pitiful.
Oh, I don’t go into the relationship with blinders on. I know the odds.
I’m a poinsettia killer. It’s in my DNA. It’s my fate.
I know that growing plants — indoors or outdoors — isn’t one of my skill sets. Without even trying, I can kill off an eggplant or tomato, sometimes before I can get them home from the market.
If I can’t even keep a philodendron alive, for heaven’s sake. So how can I possibly hope to master the botanical intricacies of when to water a poinsettia and when to ignore it, when to trim it or leave it alone, or when to lock it in a closet and keep it dark to get the red bracts atop the green leaves in time for Christmas?
So, why do I put myself (and the poor poinsettias) through the torture? Why would a brown-thumb like me try to co-exist with a plant as notoriously finicky as a poinsettia?
I just can’t resist them. They look so Christmas cheery when they hit the stores that I just have to give them a home.
This year, having bright little notes of holiday joyfulness around the house seems particularly important.
Me killing poinsettias isn’t first-degree murder, a calculated execution that’s unthinking, unloving and uncaring. It’s accidental poinsettiacide, with a sentence of 20 years to life.
It’s sad how a quickly a holiday mood can degenerate around a poinsettia that’s on its last legs, er, roots.
In the pre-pandemic days when we could still have visitors and parties, I’d resort to hiding the plants in the laundry room rather than display the obvious proof that I’m a poinsettia killer.
I try so hard to fight the inevitable.
I spend hours trying to coax my poinsettias into surviving — at least until New Year’s Eve, please.
I carefully observe the direction and intensity of sunlight and how it strikes or avoids the plant. I engage in long, apparently one-sided conversations with the plant in poinsettia language. I judiciously apply water in recommended amounts and temperatures, with and without the prescribed neon-shaded plant food.
I’ve sought advice from nursery folks and Google. I’ve even, in my desperation, considered consulting astrologers and a Ouija board.
After all, other Central Coast residents plant their poinsettias outside, for goodness sake, then basically ignore them and wind up with roof-tall, flourishing beauty that screams “Christmas” every December. To quote Dorothy, “Why, oh why, can’t I?”
Inevitably, my poinsettias throw up their brilliantly colored red bracts and expire long before the season is over, despite all my tender, loving care.
Any poinsettias that do manage to survive for a while inevitably wind up dropping all their decorative bracts. They turn into sad-looking green plants with wilting leaves that eventually curl up and die, just like the plants to which they’re attached.
Like the sign in my garden says: “I tried, but it died.”
And when that happens? I’m a big girl. I should be just fine with tossing an expired plant in the compost bin once it looks like a poinsettia version of Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree.
I may be a poinsettia killer, but I just can’t bring myself to throw away the poor scrawny thing. I’m not heartless.
Hope springs eternal, even when a plant has devolved into a scruffy skeleton of its former self. I keep trying.
Giving up on the poinsettia is the horticultural equivalent of ignoring the baby hummingbird that knocks itself loopy by flying into your window.
I have, however, developed a sneaky solution.
It’s amazing how authentically festive any green plant can look with a couple of stems of red silk poinsettias stuck in the pot — at least for as long as that plant stays green. And alive.
Yeah, it’s cheating. But it sure beats being a plant killer who throws away a Christmas poinsettia.
