Robert Buist: The Poinsettia’s Champion in Philadelphia

November 14, 1805

On this day, Robert Buist was born. He was a Scotsman by birth, trained at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, but like so many ambitious young men of his age, he cast his lot with America. At twenty-three, he crossed the Atlantic and landed in Philadelphia — a city already rich with gardens, where the fashionable gentry displayed their wealth not in jewels, but in glasshouses and exotic trees.

One of Buist’s first positions was at Lemon Hill, the grand summer estate of Henry Pratt. Imagine it: terraced lawns, rare shrubs, winding walks — regarded in its day as one of the most beautiful gardens in the United States. To have walked there in the morning light, notebook in hand, must have made the young Buist feel he had arrived in Eden itself.

But Buist was not content to remain an employee. Soon enough, he acquired the historic Bernard M’Mahon nursery, a place of deep horticultural pedigree, for it had supplied plants to none other than Thomas Jefferson. How proud Buist must have felt, walking among its beds! Today, on the very ground where that nursery once stood, an aged Sophora tree still grows — known as the Buist Sophora, a living relic with roots that reach all the way back to China, and branches heavy with memory.

Like any gardener worth his salt, Buist was a collector. His enterprise grew to include a seed division and a greenhouse, and he was quick to seize upon novelties. When Joel Poinsett, that restless American diplomat, sent home specimens of a fiery red Euphorbia from Mexico in 1825, Buist immediately procured one. He declared it “truly the most magnificent of all the tropical plants we have ever seen.”

He christened it Euphorbia poinsettia, a name sensible enough, for the milky sap betrayed its kinship with the Euphorbias. Yet, in a twist of botanical intrigue, Buist’s Scottish friend James McNab carried a specimen back across the sea in 1834 and placed it in the hands of Robert Graham at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. Graham, in that high-handed fashion so common among botanists, changed the name to Poinsettia pulcherrima. One can almost hear Buist’s Scottish growl across the centuries; he never forgave the slight.

Still, the poinsettia became his enduring gift to gardeners. Today, at Christmastime, their crimson bracts adorn parlors and churches the world over — a plant once strange and tropical, now as common as holly and ivy.

Buist was more than a nurseryman; he was a writer of practical guides. His book The Family Kitchen Gardener became a steady companion for many. In fact, when General “Stonewall” Jackson discovered gardening rather late in life, it was Buist’s book he clutched like a talisman. Jackson scribbled in its margins as we all do: “Plant this” and “try this next year,” the gardener’s shorthand of dreams deferred and delights to come. Thus Buist, though long gone, whispered advice into the hand of a general, and into countless ordinary gardens besides.

What lingers is not merely Buist’s plants or his publications, but the sense that he belonged to that peculiar fellowship of gardeners who cannot resist a new shrub, who argue over names, and who find their deepest joy with soil beneath the fingernails. As Vita Sackville-West herself might have said, his legacy is not written in stone, but in petals — ephemeral, brilliant, and stubbornly alive.