One of the ways I celebrate the winter holiday season^[1] is by purchasing a poinsettia. Problem is, they're sub-tropical shrubs and my house is much colder and darker than they really like, especially the spotted red and white ones I prefer.

poinsettia, 1/100s ev 0, iso 200 14jan2015 Shot with the lensbaby

It turns out that cultivated poinsettias are mostly grown provided by one business, and moreover are deliberately infected with phytoplasmas to get them to produce multiple flowers per stem. —I have no idea whether there's something analogous to the tobacco mosaic virus tulip breaking virus that induces the speckling on poinsettia bracts, but if so, it would explain why the spotted ones tend to be less hardy than their all-red counterparts. On the other hand, there are tons of plants that produce this sort of thing quite naturally —caladiums being a personal favourite—and even the modern tulips are bred to break on their own.

The University of N. Carolina has a delightful site with lots of photo documentation of poinsettia trials; the broken colour is called the Jingle line and I'm guessing mine—both the one shown, which I would've purchased in 2014, and the one I have now in 2020, which looks very like—are probably Red Glitter.

In any event they're cool, and they bring me a lot of holiday cheer:)

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