The Colonial Roots of Catholic Plants

This essay on the plants enshrined in Catholic tradition is the second essay in the Botanical Imaginations series, which complicates, diversifies, and proliferates the stories we tell about plants. Series editors: Laleh Ahmad, Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Ellie Kincaid, Rebecca Laurent, Kayleigh Lobdell, Clare Michaud, Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey

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Whether you walk into a Catholic church out of the balmy U.S. Southwest or a blustering Midwest winter, the “liturgical environment” you’ll step into is remarkably similar. Irrespective of the local landscape, the altar likely dons only a select few plants. Which plants depends not on where the church is located, but when you visit it. If it’s Christmastime, the poinsettia reigns unrivaled. At Easter, the Easter lily is second to none. And in “ordinary time” (Sundays between the major seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent, or Easter), greenery and a few non-specific flowers adorn holy surfaces. This recurring cycle of standardized plants align Catholic worship with the seasonal rhythms of a shared, imagined environment. 

Though no plant is uniquely Catholic, the strong and persistent tradition of certain plants in the U.S. Catholic Church, particularly the poinsettia and Easter lily, provokes an interesting question: Which—or whose—“outside” is curated within church walls? 

The Nature of Catholic Flowers

Christians have long sought God in nature. God’s creation is seen as a spiritual realm distinct from the “sinful” realm of the human. Thus certain “wilderness” has been construed as sublime,  “those rare places on earth where one… [could] glimpse the face of God.” And because so many have found God in nature, it is no surprise that “nature” is brought into churches.

Catholics refer to the “liturgical environment” as the physical space, decor, and importantly, plants and flowers curated inside church walls. Teams of parish staff and/or lay volunteers carefully construct, maintain, and change over the Church’s decor seasonally. The profundity of this task is outlined in The General Instruction for the Roman Missal (the official governing document of Catholic Mass) as critical to facilitating engagement with the Church’s teachings. Flowers, in particular, “remind us of the beauty of paradise.” 

Flowers are so deeply embedded in Catholic theological, liturgical, and cultural traditions that Protestant churches have historically avoided them out of concern that they are “too Catholic.” The “Catholicity” of the poinsettia and Easter lily, however, stems from a complex geopolitical history of racial capitalism and imperialism.

The Cuetlaxochitl and Poinsettismo

Before poinsettias became staples of Advent and Christmas Mass in the U.S., before Christians likened their unique red and white leaves to the Star of Bethlehem, and before the widespread myth of their toxicity spread through the United States, cuetlaxochitl (kwet-la-sho-she) was cultivated by the Aztecs of Southern Mexico for use in dyes, cosmetics, and medicines. 

Native to Mexico and Central America, poinsettias were brought into the Catholic Church by missionaries to Mexico in the seventeenth century. But it wasn’t until Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first U.S. ambassador to Mexico, “discovered” the plant that it journeyed to the U.S. 

The flower carries Poinsett’s name, but it’s not his only legacy. After Poinsett conspired to bring pro-U.S. factions to power in Mexico, “Poinsettismo” became a Mexican colloquialism for political meddling. His name is also mired in racist rhetoric: A slaveholder himself, Poinsett argued that Mexicans would be capable of self-governance if “white Creoles” retained their place atop the social order. Nonetheless, in 2002, the United States Congress designated December 12—the day of Poinsett’s death a century and a half earlier—as “National Poinsettia Day.” 

It was the Ecke family, German immigrants living in California, however, that created the American Christmastime icon. Paul Ecke pioneered efforts to mass-cultivate the poinsettia and grafted two varieties together to make the bushy, potted plant that still dominates the market. Today, 100 years later, about 70 percent of poinsettias come from mother plants on the Ecke Ranch in Southern California. 

But why Christmas? The association seemed, to the Ecke family, a brilliant marketing opportunity. The Ecke family sent free plants to television stations to display from Thanksgiving to Christmas and appeared on Christmas specials and The Tonight Show to promote the poinsettia as a Christmas plant. It worked. The Central America native found a home in U.S. churches, and the religious iconography that followed normalized the poinsettia as an American Christmas “tradition.” 

The Trumpets of Resurrection

Like the poinsettia, the plant that would become the Easter lily was “discovered” by Catholic missionaries—this time, in the southern islands of Japan. In the late eighteenth century, the plants became a popular addition to Victorian gardens. 

Japan remained the primary lily exporter until the political tumult of the twentieth century. After World War I, a U.S. soldier returned to his home in Oregon with a suitcase full of hybrid lily bulbs that thrived in the temperate, wet climate. When World War II severed imports from Japan, the U.S. Easter lily industry had already taken root.

Since World War II, a narrow stretch along the Oregon-California coast has blossomed into the “Easter Lily Capitol of the World.” Roughly 95% of Easter lilies sold in the U.S. are now grown by just ten producers. Resurrection, at least in floral form, is a remarkably concentrated, consolidated enterprise.

While Oregon and California happen to have perfect growing conditions for the lily, the flowers do not naturally bloom at Easter time (which notably changes year-to-year). To accomplish the feat of the Easter lily, growers engage in a three-year choreography of planting, harvesting, chilling, and re-planting lily bulbs. By fall, the bulbs are transferred to greenhouses where growing conditions are carefully calibrated to coax the plant to bloom just in time for Easter. 

Nonetheless, Catholics often describe the Easter lily’s timely bloom as a symbol of hope and resurrection. The shape of the flower, in particular, is likened to a trumpet—a triumphant and joyous announcement of Jesus’s ascension into heaven. 

The Artificial Rules of Catholic Time

The carefully scheduled miracle of the Easter lily requires fine-tuned biological and ecological manipulation. The Easter lilies that greet you when you walk into a Catholic church in Wisconsin on Easter (in March or April), for example, wouldn’t naturally bloom there until July. 

The poinsettia, also, would not boast its brilliant colors at Christmastime in churches across all the climates of the U.S. without intervention. Because poinsettias flower when daylight is sufficiently short, growers adjust the light that poinsettias receive by covering them in dark cloths to encourage flowering, or shining lights on them at nighttime to prevent flowering.  

The Easter lily and poinsettia have both been slotted into a cyclical liturgical calendar that rarely fits their natural growing conditions. They appear in nonnative habitats at unnatural times of the year so ubiquitously and regularly that few question their arrival. But in reality, not much about these plants is “natural.”

Interestingly, their unnaturalness contradicts Church doctrine.

Church guidelines imbue nature with holiness because it avoids the stain of the secular; that is, nature is seen as unmarred by human intervention. For example, one diocese encourages liturgical environment teams to “always keep in mind that the sanctuary is a reflection of heaven. Because of this, beauty, loveliness, sacredness, and grandeur must always be the rule; anything lacking quality or evoking the secular must be avoided.” 

Despite the dearth of official rules for liturgical environments, dioceses specifically discourage human-made flowers: “Artificial flowers should not be used. A man would never bring his wife fake flowers; neither should we offer them to God!” 

And yet, glitter-painted poinsettias are natural-enough. The poinsettia itself is natural-enough—even though it does not exist in “nature” (uncultivated in Mexico and Central America) as it appears in the church. The bushy, compact leaves and flowers of church poinsettias are produced by grafting techniques and by infecting the plants with a phytoplasma that inhibits their otherwise lanky growth (poinsettias otherwise grow eight to fifteen feet).

The primary task of liturgical environment teams is to make the church look and feel different from ordinary life and secular space, so that “When we enter the house of God, we…cross a threshold which symbolizes passing from the world wounded by sin to the world of the new Life.” (Notably, the season of “Ordinary Time” is also much more likely to bring “ordinary” (local) plants into the Church—albeit still uncommon). Ironically, liturgical environment teams successfully distinguish the church from its natural landscape by creating an altogether artificial environment.

Sacred Colonialism 

In as much as plants render the church a sacred space, the church also produces its retinue of plants as sacred. 

Neither lilies nor poinsettias are inherently related to Catholicism or its holidays. (Lilies are mentioned in the Bible, but its Middle Eastern subjects would have never seen an Easter lily.) Rather, their association with Catholic holidays is the product of geopolitical history, beginning with missionaries “discovering” them. 

The missionaries, transfixed by the beauty of the lily and poinsettia, would have been rapt by the unfamiliar terrain. What appeared beautiful to them is inseparable from their predispositions toward the place and its human inhabitants—which would invariably be seen as “savage.” Colonialism, after all, could not be morally justifiable if locals were not “savage” and colonizers not therefore their civilized saviors. In a land supposedly untouched by civilization, these plants were seen as pure, exotic nature. It is specifically through colonialism, Sylvia Wynter argues, that certain nature comes to represent God.

U.S. Catholic churches’ use of the poinsettia and the Easter lily both reinforces and obscures their colonial legacies. That is, their unnatural presence naturalizes the extraction, commodification, and appropriation of these plants.

And, inasmuch as the church renders these plants sacred, it also renders the colonial sacred.

Holy Capitalism

The poinsettia and Easter lily, once extracted from their native habitats, have become Church tradition in the U.S. through their commodification. 

Though neither the poinsettia nor the Easter lily is native to the U.S., they are almost exclusively grown, sold, and distributed to U.S. churches by U.S.-based growers. U.S. growers and suppliers benefit from the highly consolidated market that churns out about 70 million nearly identical poinsettias and 5 million nearly identical Easter lilies annually, for a total of 250 million USD and 22 million USD, respectively. 

Catholic plants have become big business because of the near universality of U.S. Catholic decor. Though on paper churches welcome creativity from their liturgical environment teams, the results are nearly identical across climates and geographies.

This flattening of difference, a hallmark of colonialism, results from the enshrinement of tradition. Church guidelines emphasize that change in the liturgical environment is acceptable—insofar as it adheres to tradition. At the end of the day, tradition is the most adhered-to guideline. 

The result: Though poinsettias and Easter lilies are sold almost exclusively for only a few short weeks every year, they earn first and fourth place, respectively, for highest grossing potted plants in the U.S.

Tradition is profitable—not only for the companies that grow and distribute the plants, but also for the Church itself. Many churches have annual fundraisers that encourage congregants to buy poinsettias and Easter lilies—both to support the church and to bring the Church home. Tradition and profit are intimately entangled and self-perpetuating. 

Capitalism, it seems, reigns as the most holy of all. 

Imagining Alternative Futures

Environments are always socially constructed and human-impacted. The walls of a Catholic church make its manufactured nature (pun intended) particularly apparent. The Catholic liturgical environment, carefully curated and arranged, is a cultural product of historical imaginaries and power relations.

Christmastime poinsettias and Easter lilies are two regular inhabitants of U.S. churches that have traveled from their native ecologies and transformed to reflect Western beauty standards. Their continued integration into religious rituals across the U.S. reinforces a sacred aesthetic that has been standardized through commodification. However, they were only baptized into Catholicism through the geopolitical tides of extractive colonialism.  

What if U.S. churches were not so disconnected from local landscapes? What would it mean for the local to be considered beautiful? For the native to be sacred? What might it look like for liturgical environments to reflect local ecologies rather than imported, exotic ones? Some have already begun this work. How might this shift re-root Catholic worship in place rather than empire? 

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Featured image: Altar inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, featuring Gothic architecture, stained glass windows, and floral decorations. Photo courtesy of iStock by Getty Images.

Rebecca Laurent is a Ph.D. candidate in the joint Sociology and Community and Environmental Sociology program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the current managing editor of Edge Effects. She studies the culture and politics of plants. Rebecca’s previous research has focused on oil-state entanglement and the repression of environmental activism. Contact.

Emily Burke is a dissertator in the joint Sociology and Community & Environmental sociology program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She studies social change and social action in the U.S. Catholic Church. Contact.