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PoinsemiA Ranch
Paul Ecke 111 drives his pickup
truck north on Interstate 5 in southern California,
recalling the sea of poinsettias that once covered
thousands of sun-splashed acres farmed by his fam
ily when he was growing up in San Diego County
in the 19605.
“It was glorious when the red came in,” says
Ecke, 51, the third-generation owner of the Paul
Ecke Ranch in Encinitas, Calif, (pop. 58,014).
Nowadays, as Christmas draws near each year,
hundreds of thousands of poinsettia plants bloom
in greenhouses on the ranch and millions of Ecke
bred poinsettias are sold to decorate homes, busi
nesses and churches around the world. Ecke Ranch
is the world's largest producer of poinsettias, pro
viding 50 percent of the world's—and 75 percenc
of the nation's—supply.
“We like to think that poinsettias are nature's
way of dressing up the holidays," says Andy Hig
gins, a horticulturalist and president of the Paul
Ecke Ranch. “They're like the bow on the pack
age.”
A holiday flower
Poinsettias have not always been synonymous
with Christmas. Once considered a flowering road
side weed in Mexico, the gangly plant was brought
to the United States in 1828 by Joel Poinsett, U.S.
ambassador to Mexico and an amateur horticultur
alist. In June of the following year, poinsettias were
introduced to the public at an exhibition that was
the precursor of today's Philadelphia Flower Show.
A century later, Ecke’s grandfather began cul
tivating poinsettias in California and selling the
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Paul Ecke 111 maintains the family’s floral tradition.
ornamental plant as a Christmas flower. “It was
brilliant marketing," says William LeFevre, execu
tive director of Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia,
America's oldest botanical garden. “Here you have
this wonderful showy red plant you can provide
people at the holidays. It cvas a winner.”
The first Paul Ecke arrived in Los Angeles at
age 5 with his parents who, like many other Ger
man immigrants at the time, worked the land for
a living. “His parents never learned to speak Eng
lish, so he had to take my great-grandfather to the
flower and produce market in L.A. and translate
for him, Paul 111 says. "So he learned business at a
very young age."
Launching his own business, Ecke focused on
cultivating the red poinsettias that had migrated
West over the decades and were growing wild in
California. “My grandfather sort of stumbled upon
it,' says Paul 111, who estimates the family business
began between 1915 and 1920. "Poinsettias bloom
naturally at Christmastime when the daylight
hours get shorter. There was no official Christmas
flower in those days, and he decided to fill the gap”
by selling the cut flowers at a roadside stand on
Sunset Boulevard.
As Los Angeles developed into an entertain
ment industry hub, Ecke moved his farming opera
tion south in 1923 to the beach towns of Encinitas
and Carlsbad, eventually growing poinsettias on
4,000 acres. "One year in the 19305, my grand
father woke up to a hard freeze and everv plant
was dead, Paul 111 recounts. "They went out and
dug beneath the soil line and the roots were alive.
They reproduced from the roots and saved the
business."
In 1955, Paul Ecke Jr. returned from Ohio
State University with a degree in floraculture and
new ideas about running his father's business.
Instead of shipping poinsettia rootstock by rail
to growers around the country, Paul Jr. advocated
shipping less-expensive plant cuttings by airplane
and moving the poinsettias from farm fields into
climate-controlled greenhouses.
"I can remember some very heated arguments
between my dad and my grandfather during this
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