When Oprah Winfrey bought her 65-acre Montecito, California, property in 2001, she hadn’t a clue about roses. “What did I know about a garden?” says the television personality and media powerhouse.
“I would leave my apartment in the Water Tower in Chicago at 5:30 in the morning and come back at 8:30 at night, when it was dark. I couldn’t understand what everyone was so crazy about.”
By everyone, Winfrey means her new neighbors in the sun-kissed coastal enclave east of Santa Barbara, where the blowsy flowers are a local obsession and the halcyon days make for a blooming season that lasts nearly all year.
She discovered that acreage on her land had been set aside for roses, although none had been planted yet. “I thought, Oh boy, what am I going to do with that?” she confesses.
Still, she forged ahead, turning to master rosarian Dan Bifano to create her field of flowers
Bifano, no stranger to boldface names (he has designed gardens for Barbra Streisand and Tom Ford), showed up to their first meeting with a pail filled with blossoms so he could gauge Winfrey’s taste.
He then devised a scheme that incorporated her favorites — peachy Bronze Star, Heaven on Earth in blushing pinks, and bronze-and-lavender Distant Drums.
With Bifano as her guide, Winfrey got down into the dirt. She helped with everything from laying out flower arrangements to placing plants in the ground. “I’m very hands-on,” she says. “I picked the gravel.
I picked the grout between the stonework. I decided which way the roses would face. Love is in the details.”
The garden overlooks the Pacific Ocean and the Channel Islands in the distance, a picturesque vista that Winfrey and Bifano improved upon by creating a formal plan that accentuates the majestic backdrop.
Romantic beds of roses tumble between crisp dirt paths; arches, cypress trees, and tightly clipped boxwood act as foils. Arbors dripping with Sombreuil and Pandora roses (plus jasmine, for its intoxicating scent) provide shade and harbor an outdoor dining area; a cast-iron fountain gurgles in the center.
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