Part Poinsettia, Part Picasso

Painted Plants Branch Out From the Traditional

Barbara Marsh is pushing a shopping cart loaded with poinsettias. "The purple one is for my daughter, the blue for myself, and the pink because it's pretty."

The pink is more a mauve, for the record. Clearly, these are not your old red and green poinsettias: For one thing, the pigments come from a spray bottle, not nature, and the gold glitter is definitely fake. "They're so tacky, they're pretty," said Marsh, of Arnold.

She was plying the holiday aisles at Homestead Gardens in nearby Davidsonville, where employees report brisk sales of painted poinsettias. "People, I guess, are tired of the red and white," said Laura Darley, who works in the garden center's annuals department.

Traditionalists, including many of the growers, are aghast, but the premium price for the plants may restore profitability to greenhouse owners who have seen energy bills go through the roof. Holiday shoppers love them, especially younger buyers. "It's not grandmother's poinsettia anymore," said Paul Ecke III, scion of America's poinsettia dynasty. "It's something wild and wacky."

The poinsettia is named after Joel Poinsett, a diplomat who brought the flashy red tropical shrub to America in the 1820s. But it was Ecke's grandfather and, later, his father, who grew and promoted it as a Christmas plant from their poinsettia farm in Encinitas, Calif. Seven of 10 poinsettias sold in America are of a variety developed at the Ecke ranch. This year the company "significantly" increased production of its white-flowered varieties favored for painting, Ecke said.

Painted poinsettias began "making a big splash in Europe six years ago," said Andrew Lee, vice president of Fred C. Gloeckner & Co., the Harrison, N.Y., company that supplies the coloring dyes, but only to growers and retailers, not consumers.

Last season, independent garden centers such as Homestead as well as some florists began selling it here. This year big-box retailers are doing the same, Lee said. The company sells 10 hues in its Fantasy Colors line, including apricot, blue, dark rose and fuchsia, as well as glitter and a recipe book. Aerosol sprays have been used for years to touch up flowers, but the look is entirely different with the dyes, said Lee. Also, they allow growers "to do large numbers with big commercial sprayers," Lee said. "We have people doing hundreds of thousands of these."

Jean Osta, a spokeswoman for Home Depot, said the retailer is testing the painted poinsettias in selected markets this year, including the Washington-Baltimore region, but not in every store. She advised people to call stores for availability.

Lee said the dyed poinsettias allow people to match the poinsettia to their decor or to complement other fashionable Christmas decorations. In 2005, these include retro-tinsel trees or fake trees hung upside down. The poinsettias also offer holiday fare for revelers of different faiths or ethnicities -- blue-petaled and silver-glittered poinsettias for Hanukkah, for example -- and can even be used to match the colors of a football team.

Ironically, breeders have worked hard in recent years to bring about naturally weird poinsettias, including some with plum-colored petals such as Plum Pudding; maroon varieties such as Cortez Burgundy; and novelty versions that look painted or marbled, including Monet Twilight, in speckled pink, rose and cream.

So why do we need to paint them too?

"There's no blue poinsettia," said Kerry Kelley, Homestead's annuals manager. "There's no lilac." And one other reason: Each is hand-painted and thus unique, she said. Twice a week, Kelley assumes the role of artist, lining up large, bushy plants in seven-inch pots. Most of these floral blank canvases are white-flowering varieties, though she experiments with some of the light pink or marbled types as well. Spritzing the flowers, which are actually called bracts, with dyes in spray bottles, she turns out poinsettias in a range of colors and effects. She may use ethanol to get the dye to bleed along the entire bract, and invariably there are highlights in other shades. Then it's the glue and the glitter -- silver, gold or iridescent, sprinkled like salt or pepper from plastic bottles.