Steele’S Pansy Gardens 
PORTLAND, OREGON, U. S A. 
HOWDY, FOLKS! 
The Time is early summer. 
The Place, Mr. Steele’s ranch. 
The Occasion. It’s the pansy harvest parade. 
We stand beside the new Pacific Super-highway that bisects the ranch, 
looking east. To the left is the “big field” stretching far across the little 
valley to the big hills beyond. Near to us is a wide ribbon of meadow for 
a screen, and then another field of pansies, and then another ribbon of 
meadow and another field of pansies. 
What a blaze of glory and a panorama of nature’s splendor that paradise 
never equalled and never saw! Hundreds of thousands of blooms of every 
color of the rainbow, and every year in every way they are getting better 
and better. 
Who are w'e? We are the seed pickers. We are mostly housewives and 
neighbors. The most of us have been coming back for years past. We 
have a nice large community building, constructed for our convenience. 
Twelve is a normal crew of pickers, but we have had as high as twenty on the payroll. And the harvest lasts 
from early summer whenever the bumble bees have come before us to pollinate the flowers, and until early fall. 
It’s a strange truth, but without the bumble bees for pollination there would be no happy days or payrolls at Mr. 
Steele’s ranch. 
THE HARVEST 
Each picker takes into the field with her a No. 2 splint basket and a thin muslin sugar sack with a colored key 
tag patterned to identify the variety that is ready to pick, thus avoiding the danger of mixing the seed. At the 
close of the day it is my duty to see that the day’s picking is put into sacks described above, a basket to a sack, properly 
tagged with date of picking. Then it is ready for curing. 
What wonderful plants these seed bearers are! The broad leaf, dark green foliage, the huge blooms, ripe seed, 
green seed, and blossoms all summer long. The fields in charge of “Junior” Steele, every plant is as spick and span 
as a drum major; not a weed, not a “weak sister” plant. Not a pest, not a disease of any kind, some of them with 
as many as 100 blooms—can you imagine it? Globe trotters say in all tbe world no pansies like these! 
Right here I must mention the trial gardens under the supervision of Donald (“Bud”) Steele. Here are to be 
found hundreds of plants, some of them three feet in diameter—a solid mass of hlooms covering the entire plant with 
a blaze of color. Every plant is a selected specimen and you may well say the seed selected in these gardens is 
priceless. It is used for growing the planting stock for the seed fields of the following year. In a special secluded spot 
was a bed of Jumbo plants last summer and every plant that went into this bed bore a flower measuring four or more 
inches in diameter! And all field grown at that. 
It is part of my special duties to assist Bud in picking his selections in the trial gardens. It is also another duty 
of mine to select the seed for separate colors, which must be taken from specimen plants and requires going over each 
garden several times to get as little as an ounce, as all plants in Steele’s Pansy Gardens are grown from seed stock 
from plants that show high merit in size, color, form, and substance and true to type. 
Does Mrs. Rands kno’w her job? 
I’ll say she does. — E. J. S. 
The marvelous germinating quality of Mastodon pansies is partly because of perfect climatic conditions in 
Oregon; warm, sunny weather with no showers to damage the ripening seed on the plants; no intense heat to cause 
premature development before the seed has attained perfection in its germinating powers. 
I hope that E. J. Steele, Jr., will tell you later, how, during a period of over three weeks he cures this seed 
so perfectly that 75% shells itself. 
I must tell you how courteous and well behaved our pickers are. None of us thinks she could manage the 
business of the Gardens any better than the Chief does. None of us complain that “there are too darned many straw 
bosses around here!” None of us ever get the idea we have nothing more to learn in this world. None of us ever 
think that we are picking green seed or that we are failing to find all the ripe seed. 
None of us talk loudly or too much. None of us ever mention our own family troubles. Nobody brings the 
latest news about the neighbors affairs. Even the young unmarried ladies do not tell us the names of their boy friends 
and because of our genteel manners you can readily see that we pick a lot of seed in an eight-hour day. 
I am sure that I can speak for every woman on our harvesting staff when I say that we all enjoy our work and 
count the days until the new' crop comes in. Always before the harvest ends we have a grand picnic, including the 
entire ranch and office staff. And we wdsh that all of you who love the pansy could also he wdth us. Come and see us 
“some time”. 
CL.CL. 
