“Is it time to stop? No, never. If I had more land, I’d plant more,” Ms. Hahn declared, expressing mock indignation at the idea that one could ever have too many roses. “In fact, right now I’m trying to figure out a spot I can add a couple hundred tree roses and create a rose maze.”
Most people would stop far short of 40,000 plants, but in every other respect, Ms. Hahn’s affection is about as universal as it gets in the world of horticulture. Roses are the most beloved garden plant on the planet.
Rose Story Farm is now a thriving, family-run business, one of the leading cut-rose purveyors in the United States, selling hundreds of thousands of stems of its field-grown blooms a year. Not that Ms. Hahn and her husband, Bill, ever meant to achieve that, exactly. All they wanted was a place in the country.
Scent Memories
Perched on the lower flanks of the 4,000-foot Santa Ynez Mountains, overlooking the vast azure Pacific southward, with California’s glorious oak-clad foothills behind, Rose Story Farm seems a bucolically ideal setting for an empire of roses. And Ms. Hahn is herself as elegant as the plants she grows.Her tall, erect bearing reflects the Italian stonemason bloodlines of her father, Lorenzo Dall’Armi, whose family came from the Dolomite foothills near Venice to the Santa Barbara area in 1931 to escape the impending ravages of Mussolini’s fascism. Though he had been born in California in 1922, the family returned to Italy a few years later, only to be forced to come back to the United States just a few years after that. And it was at her grandparents’ home long ago that a very young Ms. Hahn had a life-changing experience.
Scent is considered by physiologists the most evocative of all senses: Catch a hint of the perfume a long-ago love used to wear, and you are instantly drawn back years in recollection. And who among human adults does not hold fast to the memory of a distinct childhood event that catalyzed something much later in life?
So it was for Ms. Hahn, who recalls vividly the day in her grandmother’s garden when she was 6 years old and first encountered a sensational, treasured California rose—Sutter’s Gold.
“It has such a delightful fragrance, such a rich color, and every bloom is different,” Ms. Hahn rhapsodized, decades later. A family photo vividly documents that childhood discovery—her as a young girl, flaxen hair in braids, shining in the sun, leaning over to catch the scent of her grandmother’s rose. The photo is also an exquisite depiction of the transcendent appeal of roses in human life.
Ms. Hahn has a few Sutter’s Gold bushes now, but the flowers do not sell well for bouquets: “Yellow isn’t a very popular color in the retail market, and customers don’t like the fact the flowers aren’t all uniform,” she explained.
Her grandmother’s garden epiphany meant that roses are what came first to mind when she and Bill bought their 15-acre farm in January 1990. Bill’s family background also includes a rosarian grandmother and gardens and farms, most notably a hay-and-cattle operation near Ellensburg, Washington. The idea of relocating to a more rural setting from the monied coastal enclave of Montecito drew them to their current property when their two boys were young.
“We wanted to raise our kids in a rural environment, not in a place where their schoolmates wondered why they weren’t going to Courchevel for spring break,” Ms. Hahn said. Their two boys spent their youth roaming the foothills, riding horses, doing farm chores, and learning how to make their way in the world. Now, one son is an oncologist, and the other is an opera singer who splits his time between Europe and America.
A Business Blooms
At first, the Hahns had no intention of turning their new home’s rose garden, however lavish, into a business. Both had well-paying careers—he is a gastroenterologist, and she had been an event designer in the film industry after running a small chain of retail boutiques. But their new property brought daunting cash flow requirements, including four cottages along with the 10-bedroom 1880s main house. They boosted their income by renting out the cottages, including one to a friend who was a floral designer. That friend was enchanted with Ms. Hahn’s roses and began using them himself.“I thought to myself, ‘If he likes them so much, why wouldn’t lots of other people?’” she recalled.
Hundreds of roses turned into thousands, then tens of thousands. One early adventure came when they ordered 10,000 roses at once. The plants arrived almost two months earlier than the Hahns expected—“Lady, we ship the roses when they are ready, not when you’re ready,” the growers told Ms. Hahn—and they had to scramble to get them in the ground, enlisting 40 friends, one shovel apiece, to dig holes and place the plants. “It was like a Laurel and Hardy movie,” Ms. Hahn said.
As with any nascent business, mistakes turned into learning experiences. Of the initial five varieties they decided to grow commercially, one failed entirely in their climate, and one only bloomed once a year. “Hard to keep cash flow up if you only have flowers for a month,” Ms. Hahn said, laughing.
Today, they grow 160 varieties, including old-fashioned European and pre-1950 American ones, embracing every color in the rose pantheon. They sell about 90 of those varieties as cut flowers. Ms. Hahn has also written a lusciously illustrated book about her passion, “The Color of Roses: A Curated Spectrum of 300 Blooms” (2023).
The farm is not open to the public for walk-in visits, but the Hahns recently hosted a philanthropic event in which their historic, 10-bedroom house was comprehensively and gloriously decorated with roses by different designers—roses everywhere, literally. “There were even roses spilling out of the dishwasher in the kitchen,” Ms. Hahn said. “Sounds wacky, but it was gorgeous. And this is what I had dreamed of all those years ago: a house filled with roses from our own garden, floor-to-ceiling in every room.”
And what is the meaning of all this beauty and growth?
“Simple,” she said. “If you really want to, you can make a dream come true.”
Tips for Budding Rose Gardeners
Danielle Dall’Armi Hahn’s tips for home gardeners wishing to grow roses are relatively few and simple:- Start with a cultivar from the past 20 years, when rose breeders have concentrated on creating hardy, disease-resistant types. Her favorites include Love Song, Queen of Sweden, Golden Celebration, and Pope John Paul II, the last a highly fragrant one.
- When planting, making sure there is proper drainage is key. “Roses just don’t like to have their feet wet,” Ms. Hahn said. If your ground is heavy (clay is usually the culprit), roses will benefit from a layer of gravel, loose soil, or sand laid in a foot or more deep, beneath the improved topsoil in which you plant the shrub. Ms. Hahn goes 18 to 24 inches deep when placing a new plant.
- Be consistent in your rose management. “You can do something to your roses every two minutes and get pretty flowers. You can do almost nothing and get pretty flowers,” she said. “But you cannot go back and forth between the two approaches. Pick one and be consistent.”
- The two tasks all rose growers should undertake are proper pruning and autumn application of a dormant spray, such as lime sulphur, to suppress diseases. Ms. Hahn urges gardeners to prune a rose lightly its first year. Thereafter, a light, late-summer trim—perhaps a third of the plant—leads to an autumn late bloom. At the end of autumn, a more thorough pruning readies the plant for winter dormancy.
