hope that this little dahlia seed catalogue will be very interesting to you. 
I want to express my appreciation to the Santa Barbara News-Press which 
assigned Mr. Chet Holcombe to visit my garden and write a feature story about 
my floral achievements which appeared in its Sunday edition, August Ist, 1948. 
In it Mr. Holcombe wrote under the heading “Dahlia Fancier Does the Im- 
possible—Develops Self-Pollenization Here.” He continued: “After years of work and 
experimentation, Curtis Redfern has just achieved his goal—self-pollenization of 
dahlias. Growers around the world had been striving without success to convey pollen 
from the anther of a dahlia flower to the stigma of the same flower. Redfern has 
accomplished it, achieving an inbreeding of the world’s choicest blooms to insure the 
retention of qualities that are wanted rather than the former hit-and-miss method of 
cross-pollenization between flowers.” He further commented that I had retired as 
assistant to the Consulting Geologist of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company after 
forty-two years service, and that for eight years I was president of the Dahlia Society 
of California and three times a vice-president of the American Dahlia Society. 

He then went on to comment that while the end of the War was a happy day 
for the world, it was not true for me as I had on V-J Day suffered a severe paralytic 
stroke and had lost the use of my left arm. That I had been in the hospital for three 
months in San Francisco and was practically an invalid in 1946. 
He further stated that it took more than that to keep me down. That I came to 
Santa Barbara early in 1947 and established a garden at 1223 East Quinientos Street 
and continued experiments in the production of self-fertilized Mendelian dahlia seed, 
which I had carried on years ago in my San Francisco garden. 
Late last September I solved the problem of self-fertilization and was watching 
with great interest the development of seed pods when the garden on Columbus Day 
was practically beaten down by a high, drying wind. 
The seeds were harvested and planted the last week of February of this year. 
Many germinated within two days and some held off as long as a month before sprout- 
ing. The two hundred seedlings were potted in small containers and were planted in 
the garden during the first week of May. They started blooming in early July and 
many of the seedlings are still blooming now, in the middle of October. 
