The Inside/Out article, “Growing Holiday Cheer,” is my favorite of 2010 because it is typical of life; we take so much for granted. Case in point; buying a poinsettia for our holiday tables. We rush into the grocery store for some random item and discover poinsettias have arrived, colorful and wrapped in cellophane It's an oh-yes-I-need-that-moment, and we gratefully check it off our list, but there is more! That poinsettia has been a grower’s focus for months — months tending to what now gives Holiday cheer to our tables. I am forever amazed at what I don't know and take for granted, while happily buying my pretty poinsettia. —Cinthia Milner, freelance writer
“Here’s the skinny on poinsettias, and why I buy mine every year instead of growing them. First, poinsettias are known as a short-day, or photoperiodic, plant. That means they can’t be exposed to more than 12 hours of daylight. If they are, they will not initiate flowering to eventually turn that beautiful red color. The plants will stay in a vegetative state. By the way, what looks like a flower on a poinsettia is actually a cluster of small flowers surrounded by leafy bracts. A bract is a modified leaf that may be highly colored, like on poinsettias.”
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