Potpourri of poinsettias

November/December 2022 California Bountiful magazine

Visiting nursery a festive
holiday tradition for many

Story by Linda DuBois
Photos by Richard Green

Pleasant Hill travel agent Vera Kaufman can always count on one day-trip destination being a big hit with clients: Duarte Poinsettias in Hughson.

Every holiday season, she takes about seven busloads of 40 to 45 retirees from Bay Area senior centers who enjoy soaking in the nursery’s yuletide atmosphere and shopping for beautiful plants iconic of Christmas.

An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 people each year pass through the 5-acre Stanislaus County nursery doors to find poinsettias with the perfect colors, patterns and shapes. To the backdrop of Christmas music and decorations, families, friends, classrooms and various community groups have made this excursion an annual tradition. Some families return each year to take their holiday card pictures.

“It’s a great shopping opportunity for the holidays. The guests buy them as gifts for family members or friends or just for themselves,” Kaufman says. “And everybody has a good time. It kind of puts them in a great holiday spirit.”

She adds that the poinsettias are healthy and hardy. “When I bring one home, it usually lasts me for the whole year,” she says. “And (the Duartes) are wonderful people to work with and so accommodating.”

This year, Kaufman’s guests and the rest of the crowds will be back from Nov. 12 to Dec. 21 (except for Thanksgiving Day) to choose from among 68,000 poinsettias in 37 different varieties. The plants are $12 each, cash or check only.

Colorful varieties

The poinsettias take up a tiny fraction of the 200-acre Duarte Nursery, a wholesale business that sells a wide variety of nut trees and grapevines to farmers. Now the nation’s largest permanent-crop nursery, it was founded in 1988 by Jim and Anita Duarte and their sons John and Jeff. The family added poinsettias in 1993 to give employees year-round work. It’s the business’s only product sold retail.

While she and her husband have retired and handed the main business over to their sons, Anita Duarte still manages the poinsettias.

“That’s kind of my baby,” she says. “I just enjoy everyone coming in. Year after year, I see the same people and then we have new people who are fun to meet.”

Visitors are often amazed by the number and variety of poinsettias. “I can always spot a person that’s there for the first time because their mouth drops open,” Duarte says with a laugh.

While the plants are known for their traditional bright red color, only six of Duarte Poinsettias’ 37 varieties are hues of red. Others are different shades of pink, yellow, white, beige, orange or multicolored, each with leaves of various patterns, shapes and sizes. Duarte tries to add at least one new variety each year. Among the most popular are Jingle Bells, Ice Crystal, Autumn Leaves (a golden color popular for Thanksgiving), Red Glitter, Picasso, Lipstick Pink and Tapestry.

“Last year was a new one with little round pink leaves called Mouse Ears. That was a fun one,” Duarte says.

Some people walk in seeking the new varieties, but, overall, the most popular remains the traditional red—“especially if a man comes in. They’ll only buy the red ones,” she says with a laugh.

An ancient start

Native to Mexico, poinsettias were prized by the ancient Aztecs and introduced to America in the mid-1820s by the first U.S. ambassador to Mexico, the botanist Joel Roberts Poinsett.

“That’s how it got the name,” Duarte explains. They eventually were developed to thrive indoors in pots and became the most popular plant sold during the holidays.

A common misconception is that the vibrant colors are flowers. They are actually leaves, known as bracts, that turn from green to another color when exposed to winter’s long nights. The flowers are the tiny yellow clusters at the center of the colored leaves.

Duarte Poinsettias buys rooted cuttings that typically arrive in June and July and grow in the back of the greenhouse. Around Nov. 1, the staff will start bringing them to the sales portion of the greenhouse, where they put labels on them and sort them by variety.

Unlike some growers, the Duartes don’t cover the plants or do anything special to make them change color.

“Once the days start getting shorter, they just start turning in the greenhouse. We just have to make sure that all the lights around the greenhouse are turned off starting in October,” Duarte says.

Diverse fanbase

All the preparations pay off when the visitors show up.

“We get all kinds of people,” Duarte says, adding some are especially memorable.

A group from Japan didn’t speak English but used their smartphones to translate questions and answers. “That was a really fun group!” Duarte says.

She also enjoyed a group of blind people. “I took them around and told them to feel the plants and explained what they looked like and how big they were.”

Most large groups will make appointments, but some just drop in. “We’ll look out the door and there are, say, three buses there that we don’t know were coming—which is fine. We love it,” Duarte says. “If it gets a little hairy, we’ll call the office and say, ‘Anybody who can breathe, please come and help us!’”

The staff will then eagerly hurry to greet the visitors with hot cider and cookies and help with purchases.

Many visitors buy one or two plants, but some buy in bulk, such as churches wanting to decorate their sanctuaries or clubs planning a holiday party. The nursery also offers discounted rates to nonprofits wanting to sell poinsettias for fundraisers.

Anyone seeking more than a basic plant can choose from decorative bouquets. “I have a couple of ladies who make up combos (of poinsettias with cyclamen and various greenery). They enjoy looking for nice containers—we’ve got ceramic, wood, plastic. We’ll use little tricycles with a pot in the back—anything we can find that will look cute.”

At age 85, Duarte plans to continue managing the poinsettia sales for as long as she can.

Besides interacting with the customers, she also enjoys working with her employees. “I love going out in the greenhouse and being with my crew. They’re just the best,” she says.

“And I just enjoy it. It’s a happy time. Everybody’s in a good mood and, I mean, why wouldn’t you be happy out there with all those plants and beautiful colors?” 

Linda DuBois

Caring for poinsettias

A colorful poinsettia adds a festive flair to home décor during the holidays. But if it starts to droop, fade or drop leaves, it can really ruin the mood.

Anita Duarte of Duarte Poinsettias in Hughson offers several tips to keep the plants looking their best.

She recalls a customer puzzled over why her poinsettia had died. “She said, ‘I don’t know what happened. I water it every day.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s the problem.’ They like to be just slightly moist,” Duarte says.

“I tell people, ‘Pick it up. If it feels light and the soil is dry, water it, but don’t just water it because it’s Saturday.’ We encourage people to take them to the sink to water them and then let them drain well.”

It’s also important to keep them away from any heat vents.

Giving them good light, next to a window, will keep the color more intense, Duarte adds.

For customers wanting their poinsettias to last year after year and change color for each holiday season, she offers this advice: “Put them in a dark closet overnight for 14 hours and then take them out and give them light during the day. You have to do that for two weeks consistently.” She admits though that she’s yet to hear of anybody who remembered every day and had it work well.

One thing people won’t need to worry about: Don’t obsess about keeping the cat or dog away. “They are not poisonous. That’s a myth,” she says. In fact, Duarte has a favorite joke about that: “What’s the difference between a poinsettia and fruitcake? You can eat a poinsettia.”