In 1865, a German-born monk worked busily about a monastery garden in Austria-Hungary. He was educated in philosophy, physics, gardening and beekeeping. Moving about in his habit, he must have looked like a big brown bee, buzzing about and groping the pea plants, day in and day out. Imagine him manipulating nature, hand fertilizing each of the 29,000 pea plants that he worked with for his research. He saw that when he cross-bred certain colors of pea plants with others, a pattern emerged, a predictability that might mean something huge about how we understand heredity. So he wrote a scientific paper, which was largely ignored for the next 50 years. Various scientists later rediscovered his research in the 20th century. History knows Gregor Mendel as the father of modern genetics. His messing about with pea plants changed the world.

In a lab in Encinitas there are big worker bees, not in brown habits but in ‘full suits,’ not in a monastery garden but in a greenhouse or lab, who are assaulting plants as did Mendel, furiously making notes. Their goal is the same on one level; as Mendel wrote, “in order to obtain new variations in color.” Their methods are at times just as scientific, but at others science fictional. Why do they wish to generate new species? Why are they embroiled in a plot to produce purple, pink or orange poinsettias? The Paul Ecke Ranch has a solid business plan: to send mutant plants into the world and completely infiltrate all poinsettia production, so that every single plant grown in the future will bear the genetic stamp of the Paul Ecke Ranch.

The Ranch’s roots started in Hollywood after Albert Ecke settled there in 1906. As the development of Hollywood started sucking up land, the Ranch moved to its current Encinitas location in 1923. It was the son of Albert, Paul Sr., who found a particular interest in poinsettias, a native plant of Mexico introduced to the U.S. in the early 1800s by Joel Roberts Poinsett. The red plants grew wild throughout the Los Angeles area and their annual cycle of blooming during the winter and near the holidays inspired Paul Sr. to market the poinsettia as the official holiday flower. Eventually it was Paul Jr. that worked tirelessly to keep the plant before the public, using all realms of media to place the poinsettia as a holiday symbol.

Today, Paul Ecke III leads the Paul Ecke Ranch on Saxony Road in a new direction of poinsettia development. Ecke explains the plan of attack, “We’re doing R&D. So we get new varieties a lot of different ways. What we do is the old-fashioned hybridization where we just, you know, boy meets girl, seed, new plant. And then we do about 5,000 of those every year. Some of it’s art, some of it’s skill, some of it’s luck.” Ecke explains that when his grandfather, Paul Ecke Sr., was planting a field of poinsettias, he would notice a “spontaneous mutation,” like a white plant in a field of reds. So, taking that genetic anomaly, he would reproduce a clone, (asexual reproduction) and then another, and another, and so on. They still do that. But they also do some “kinda wacky” things, as Ecke admits.

Take ‘Strawberries and Cream;’ it may sound yummy, but that particularly beautiful plant was produced by zapping its forefathers (or mothers) with radiation. Ecke explains, “Instead of growing a thousand acres to get one white plant, we shove it under the x-ray machine and turn up the dial to unsafe levels and most of it’s trashed, but every once in a while we get something kind of cool.” He calls the process “induced mutation,” or making something happen that would take too long or perhaps never happen in nature. They have other ways of making the plants mutate. He continues; “We also dip [the poinsettias] into some nasty chemicals.”

It gets wackier. Recall The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells, whereby the evil doctor splices different embryonic species together via vivisection to make weird man-animal breeds. In an eerie coincidence, Ecke mentions the lion/tiger breeds made at the zoo, called “ligers” when explaining another course of experiments done on the Ranch. Of course, the ligers are not begotten via crude vivisection, but Ecke enthusiastically embraces this sci-fi concept of crossing species. Ecke says, “We do induced mutation, traditional hybridization, and then every once in a while we do some tricky stuff which we call ‘inner-specific crosses.’” He indicates a lovely plant from the catalogue called ‘Dulce Rosa,’ which looks like a poinsettia and an impatien, but Ecke won’t say what it is. He says coyly, “That’s a cross between a poinsettia and something else. [The zoo] can make lions and tigers have offspring. And so it’s kind of like that. It’s two species that don’t normally reproduce.”

It’s amazing how many times you can hack apart a plant and watch it re-grow. After a years-long process of selecting the most viable mutants in Encinitas, they test them in confidential sites around the world. Cuttings are taken from the hardiest of these and sent to offshore Ecke-owned farms to ‘build up’ stronger plants called ‘mother plants.’ Cuttings are taken again, and the fittest mutants are sold from overseas to growers around the world. Ecke explains the rationale of offshore production, “Over time other breeders came in and started taking away our market share and…by-and-large they did not set up production in America, they set it up offshore in Mexico, Costa Rica… [they] sell cuttings at 25 cents a piece when it costs us 25 cents a piece to make them in Encinitas…We ended up down in Guatemala. We set up a company down there…now we have three farms and we also contract in Mexico and Costa Rica.” The Ecke Ranch in Guatemala is a well-oiled machine. According to the September issue of GrowerTalks magazine, “Paul said that in the first year of production, Ecke Guatemala surpassed its quality standards by 100 percent, and now Guatemala equals or surpasses Ecke’s U.S. standards.” The magazine describes modern, clean facilities run by, for example, a production manager (who sounds more like a general) as he “quotes The Art of War when discussing problem solving.”

If the Encinitas Paul Ecke Ranch is the hive, then what are all the acres and acres of honeycomb-like greenhouses still doing there if they aren’t making mutants? The bright poinsettia plants, once lined up like little soldiers during the time of Paul Ecke Jr., are gone. The truth is that most of the greenhouses sit abandoned. A common misconception is that Paul Ecke Ranch grows poinsettia plants to completion and ships them from the Encinitas location. Actually, they grow seedlings for testing new breeds, as well as sell and ship some cuttings from complete breeds. Even the latter activity will cease as of 2008, when Paul Ecke Ranch in Encinitas will be strictly research and development, corporate headquarters and marketing. They simply don’t need all that space. Back in 2005, the Ranch attempted through a city-wide vote to have most of the 68 acres of land re-zoned from agricultural to residential, so as to sell it off, and use some of the profits to modernize the 10 to 15 acres on which the Ranch now operates. The attempt failed and now, as Ecke states, “The result is exactly what I said it would be; empty, fallow land.”

But Ecke is not bitter. He is concentrating on a master plan for world domination, which is domination of the poinsettia market, new markets through partnerships with Oglvee Growers, The Flower Fields in Carlsbad, and acquiring smaller poinsettia growers. The Ranch is responsible for about 70 percent of the poinsettias grown in the U.S., and 50 percent worldwide, a number that has lessened in the past 20 years due to the competition figuring out some of their secrets. As Ecke states, “We’ve always just tried to experiment and figure out a path and if the path works we keep going on it and if the path doesn’t work we close that path down and we…look for another one…We’re always trying to figure out a new path.”

Whether the path is primrose or geraniums, poinsettias or some other annual, Paul Ecke III is a fighter who uses science, business acumen and a lot of creativity to keep Paul Ecke Ranch thriving. To find out more about the fascinating history of the ranch and anything you want to know about the poinsettia flower, visit www.ecke.com. •