The bloom is off the poinsettia business
COLUMN ONE
Encinitas' Ecke family, who turned a gangly weed into the definitive Christmas flower, has to keep experimenting.
Reporting from Encinitas, Calif. — On a day when America's banks were failing and the Big Three automakers were on their knees begging Congress for money, Paul Ecke III could muster little sympathy.
"I can't go to Washington looking for a bailout," the 53-year-old industry leader said. "I should be making $20 million a year like these auto guys. All they have to do is make good cars that don't break down. Mine is a far more complicated business."
Foreign competitors and outdated equipment. Lowball pricing by upstarts trying to muscle market share. Crushing energy costs and a tanking economy. European regulators and Chinese patent thieves.
The poinsettia game has never been tougher.
"When I tell people that I'm in the flower business, they say, 'Ohhh, that must be so pretty,' " Ecke said. "But I can tell you it's no tiptoe through the tulips."
The Eckes of Southern California are to poinsettias what De Beers of South Africa is to diamonds. Over the last century, four generations of Eckes took a cold-weather bloomer few Americans had ever seen and made it a holiday staple.
Their zealous promotion is the reason the poinsettia is the nation's bestselling potted plant -- an astonishing fact considering about 100 million are sold each year in just six weeks. Let's see the iPhone top that.
German immigrant Albert Ecke and his family were headed to Fiji to open a health spa when they stopped in Los Angeles in 1900 and liked what they saw. They established a dairy farm and fruit orchard a few years later in the Eagle Rock area.
Ecke became intrigued by the red-and-green shrub that is native to Mexico and Central America and grew wild throughout the Southland. The Aztecs extracted dyes and a fever treatment from poinsettias, and the Spanish used it as a Christmas decoration. The plant was brought to the United States in the late 1820s by the first U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Joel Roberts Poinsett.
Ecke was the first to develop the commercial potential. He grew poinsettias on farmland in Hollywood and sold them from street stands. His son, Paul Ecke Sr., had bigger ideas.
A visionary horticulturist and businessman, Paul Ecke Sr. gave the poinsettia a makeover through a secret breeding technique that turned the delicate and gangly weed into a sturdy and voluptuous potted plant. In the 1920s he moved south and laid a carpet of poinsettias stretching from Carlsbad to Encinitas.
