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by Hannelore Sudermann
 Dan Pearson and his daughter Alyssa pick flowers for the farmer's market
When Dan Pearson was eight years old, his father brought a batch
of brown tubers home and planted them in the yard. Intrigued, Dan
helped tend the vigorous plants that sprang from them and watched
them bloom into flashy, brightly hued flowers, some as big as a
dinner plate. He memorized the names of all 30 varieties.
The next spring, tickled by his son’s interest, Chester Pearson
’59 planted even more. Their yard was so full of color that cars
would slow as they drove by. One day when a car stopped, Dan
offered to sell some blooms for a dollar. Pretty soon it was a
regular event. “I’d run in the house and get a steak knife out of
the drawer and cut them a bouquet,” he says. The next year the
Pearsons hung a “Dan’s Dahlias” sign, and the kid was in
business.
Dan ’95 tells this story while tending his busy booth at the
Northwest Flower & Garden Show this February. What seemed to be
a summer hobby for an eight-year-old has become a vocation for
Pearson, who now has three acres and 300 varieties of dahlias, a
winter business selling tubers, and a summer business selling
blooms.
By the time he was 11, Dan was selling his flowers at the Olympia
Farmers Market. Since the Pearsons lived a ways out in the country,
Dan would ride with his mother into town and unload his jars and
boxes before she headed off to get groceries. When she was done,
she’d pick him up and head home.
“He was a really small boy,” says Chester Pearson. “A lot of
little old ladies wanted to give this kid their money.”
There were some, though, who didn’t realize he was the vendor, says
Dan. “They’d see this child arranging the jars and would come up to
me and say, ‘Now, honey, don’t touch the flowers.’”
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Think your dahlia has a disease? Want to know more about the
plant? Check out the dahlia virus Website of Hanu R. Pappu,
Associate Professor and President Samuel H. Smith Endowed Chair in
Plant Virology.
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