Word: seedsmen
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...seedsmen were hawking their spring wares with a new peacetime vigor, hoping to keep sales near wartime levels. In the annual carnival of catalogues, the color work was gaudier than ever, the prose more aglow than before with full-bodied, giant varieties of superlatives...
Long Stems, Big Prices. Detroit's Ferry-Morse Seed Co., which claims to be the "world's largest producer and distributor" of vegetable and flower seeds, introduced a sweet pea called the Cuthbertson, notable for long stems and resistance to summer heat. Manhattan's Max Schling Seedsmen, Inc., the Tiffany of seed houses (it once got as much as $10 for a packet of delphinium seeds), offered a "Tyrian pink and yellow" dahlia at $15 for a single tuber...
...gardening enthusiasm in 1944, when the U.S. had an estimated 22 million gardeners, vegetables accounted for nearly 75% of all seed sales; now they were leveling off to a peacetime norm of slightly more than 50%. But vegetable growers, too, had plenty of novelties to choose from. Almost all seedsmen were featuring a new brownish-tinged lettuce called Bronze Beauty. Other attractions: a midget watermelon (Schling), a hybrid eggplant (Burpee), a yellow sweet pepper (Manhattan's Peter Henderson), a "giant tree tomato" (Vaughan's of Chicago...