The Unseasonable Winter Flowers of 1877
A boastful look at Seattle's climate resilience in the face of mid-winter blooms.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Our neighbor, Mr. Anderson, presented us as a New Year present a bouquet of flowers, gathered on Jan. 1, 1877, from his garden. The gift now lies before us and is composed of roses, pansies, daisies, violets, sweet Williams and chrysanthemums. After receiving the above, Mr. Lawton, of the Seattle Nursery, brought in a bouquet gathered on the same day, containing in addition to the flowers mentioned above, mignonette, neophylos, geraniums, primroses, polyanthus, sea-trosa, Scotch broom, besides several other fine varieties which our knowledge of Botany is not adequate to name—all growing on New Year's day, in an open garden. No more emphatic test of the incomparable excellence of the climate of Puget Sound can be had than this: that while we are gathering roses from our open-air garden terraces, our Atlantic brethren are, as the telegraph informs us, in the midst of a driving storm of sleet and snow.
“No more emphatic test of the incomparable excellence of the climate of Puget Sound can be had than this.”
This 1877 report captures a quintessential Seattle preoccupation: the bragging rights of our mild, rain-soaked winters compared to the brutal realities of the rest of the country. While our weather patterns have shifted, the civic pride in our 'incomparable' evergreen climate remains a cornerstone of the Seattle identity.
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