Everybody thinks of Christmas when they think of Poinsettia, and yes, most of the time these shrubs flower in December, January and February, but I got this late bloomer in May.
Everybody used to have Poinsettia in their garden, frequently planted next to a shrub called Snow on the Mountain, so that the two would be blooming side by side in the festive Christmas season, and a striking pair they would make with the bright red Poinsettia next to the bright white Snow on the Mountain.
The shrub will grow to four, five or six feet in height, but it likes to be trimmed back when it’s finished flowering, so that it can bush out and still leave plenty of time for flowering in the winter months, flowering that is governed by the number of hours of darkness that the plant receives. If the shrub is close to a streetlight or residential lights, the flowering tends to be confined to the side of the plant away from these lights, and nowadays is quite common to see one side covered in red and the other side all green. Not the unusual shape of the leaves which can be seen clearly in the following photograph.
Poinsettia is a milk plant, so you do need to be careful when trimming it as the milk will blister your skin and make a black stain on clothing. The potted Poinsettia plants that are sold at Christmas time in a variety of colours from white to pink to red, do not do well in the ground and tend to die off after a few months, and the ordinary one pictured here would not do very well in a pot, and tends to be more scraggly, but strikingly beautiful.
It’s not really Christmas without being able to drive around Barbados and see richly blooming Poinsettia in gardens all over the island.
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