They hired friends, neighbors, high school kids and interns from Sweden, Denmark and other countries to help out. They planted trees, including two sequoia saplings along 15th Avenue.
They grew bulbs for begonias, lilies, irises and dahlias. They planted fields, built a couple of greenhouses and a larger home next to the cottage, and Swanson’s Land of Flowers was back in business by 1924. Legend has it that they met a widow who owned ten acres of land and a small cottage on a gravel road (15th Avenue NW), and struck a deal, trading their California farm for her property. In 1922, they decided to try again, this time in Seattle, near the Scandinavian enclave of Ballard. But just as they were getting started, a harsh cold snap (rare, but not unheard of down there) wiped out their crop. The two married, combined their businesses and began to raise a family.Īround 1920, they left Minnesota for the warmer climes of southern California, purchasing farmland in Altadena to grow begonia bulbs for the wholesale trade. There he met Selma, the owner of a small local flower shop. Paul, Minnesota, where he started a greenhouse operation called Swanson’s Land of Flowers in 1888. The Swansons story started a few decades earlier, when August immigrated from Sweden, paying his passage to America with money from a pamphlet he wrote about horticulture. In spite of the headlines, however, Seattle was, by most accounts, “a pretty nice place to live,” a relatively quiet (and isolated) burg with wood-frame houses and an Olmsted-designed park system. Downtown Seattle was awash in the Denny Regrade, encompassing optimism and upheaval in one project. These were the Roaring 20s: jazz, flappers, Prohibition, workers’ unrest and political scrambles, emerging from the trauma of World War I.
Seattle, like much of the United States in the early 1920s, was a place of optimism and upheaval. It’s hard to believe that we have been helping Seattleites beautify their spaces for nearly a century, ever since August and Selma Swanson and their three children arrived here in 1924 to make a new start. As we ramp up for an exciting new growing season at Swansons, we’re savoring our history and looking forward excitedly to our future.
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