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La Vie en Rose BY SUSAN STILES DOWELL
PRODUCED BY BEVERLY MCGUIRE SCHNUR  Complete with buds, 'Madame Pierre Oger,' 'Belle Story,' 'Sonia Rykiel,' 'St. Swithun' and 'Abraham Darby' display their nuances of color and form in an antique French bottle carrier. (PHOTO: JOE STANDART)
It was almost impossible to buy romantically fragrant, old-fashioned cut roses. Until Danielle Hahn planted thousands on her California farm and grew a beautiful business. First it was a hobby, stemming from Danielle Hahn's vivid memories of the scented roses her grandmother grew. She made them the centerpieces of her own gardens -- antique, shrub, and old hybrid tea roses garnered from esoteric catalogs. It wasn't until she and her physician husband, William, and their two sons moved to a fifteen-acre farm in Carpinteria, California, that she could dream of taking them public. Here in the Santa Barbara foothills, where roses can repeat bloom six or more times a year, Danielle planted four hundred of her favorite European and David Austin varieties as a test crop for a boutique business. "I wanted to grow varieties you never see outside of private gardens," she says,
"varieties rarely available for floral arrangements becausethey are so challenging to grow."
By the time she launched Belle Story Farm (named for a David Austin rose honoring the first woman in the British navy), a thousand more bushes had joined her original plantings, giving her 119 tested varieties. "Almost all are pre-1950," she says, "with unusual shapes and colors and fragrances -- citrus, honey, licorice, apple, myrrh -- that commercial hybridizers have bred out for the sake of certain forms and vase longevity."
Though self-taught in rose lore and cultivation, Danielle has a solid marketing sense from twenty-five years of running her own gift and children's-clothing shops in Santa Barbara. The colors she chooses suit her clients' needs: white, ivory, blush, apricot, and peach for weddings; jewel tones to enhance today's interiors; and whimsical bicoloreds, which she predicts will become increasingly popular. All are handled with exquisite care by her shippers. She's also created a hot market for fresh rose petals. If a client calls early, she'll set aside rows to harvest for tossing at a wedding or shaping into a luscious carpet.
Excerpted from the February 2002 issue of Victoria magazine.
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