Swan Island Dahlias

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Swan Island Dahlias
legal form
founding 1927
Seat Canby, Oregon, USA
Branch horticulture
Website www.dahlias.com

Swan Iceland Dahlias is the geographically largest and most important breeding dahlias breeding nursery in the United States . The company is based in Canby , Oregon . Today more than 350 varieties of dahlias are produced on more than 40 acres of land (that's 16 hectares ).

history

The family business was founded in Portland (also in Oregon) in 1927 . The first owners were Frances McCarter (later name McDuffee) and her husband. The original company name (company) was Rex Dahlia Gardens , changed to Portland Dahlia Gardens in 1934 and Swan Island Dahlias in 1948 . This current company gave the company a former island in the Willamette River , Swan Island, after which it was converted to the mainland by landfills in the mid-1920s, and it owned a warehouse there. Because the site (in today's Overlook district) was converted into a military shipbuilding yard during the Second World War in the early 1940s, the company moved to Canby, initially on leased land, and from 1953 on initially on 20 acres of its own land. In 1952, Frances's son Dick McCarter and his wife Shirley took over the business. 1963 acquired from Laurel in Washington State coming couple Nick and Margaret Gitts the dahlia farm of the original owners. They expanded the operation to today's 40 acres. In 1975, their sons Nicholas and Ted joined the company as partners and took over management in 1991. They strengthened wholesaling, expanded the mail order business via catalogs, enlarged the company's annual dahlia variety show, which attracts tens of thousands of visitors at a time, and converted the sales organization to IT . Today the daughters of Nicholas, Jennifer Gitts-Eubanks and Heather Gitts-Schloe, as well as Ted's son, Derek Gitts, also work in the business. Swan Island Dahlias has sales of around $ 1.5 million.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ portlanddahlia.com: Beginnings of the Portland Dahlia Society , English
  2. ↑ Winter's back, but spring is in the mail ( Memento of January 9, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), English, December 2009

Coordinates: 45 ° 16'47 "  N , 122 ° 42'26"  W.