Poinsettias are a favourite plant during the Christmas season. Its bright red leaves are the most common out of the different coloured bracts, making it a popular decoration in our houses. The common myth that poinsettias are poisonous if ingested by us or our pets has lingered for quite some time.

This myth seems to have originated from some false claims of the death of an American child back in 1919. This plant was named after Joel Roberts Poinsett, a former medical student, amateur botanist and US Ambassador to Mexico, who brought the plant from Mexico in the late 1820s. Up until the 1920s the plant was not known to be poisonous, until the botanist Joseph Francis Rock claimed that a two-year-old child had died from sucking on the leaves of the poinsettia.

Some of the stems and leaves of plants in the Euphorbiaceae family contain milky saps which cause indigestion if eaten by animals. The compounds found in these saps play an important role in plant chemical defence mechanisms. When the leaf is broken, the irritating sap is produced, and while it is not lethal, it is certainly not for eating. One need not be afraid to leave the poinsettia on the ground within reach of children or pets, as the National Poisons Information Service index states that a 26 kilogram child would have to eat more than 500 poinsettia bracts before coming close to a toxic threshold.

This dark Christmas myth can be put to rest, as poinsettias are not poisonous.