A new and deliciously fragrant pink rose discovered in Barbra Streisand’s Malibu garden is finally available for purchase this spring, five years after it was discovered.
Only about 2,000 of the hybrid tea rose bushes, dubbed Barbra’s Baby, are available so far. More should be available in years to come. But whether or not you can get your hands on one this spring, one has to wonder: Would a new pink rose with any other name create such a stir?
Streisand politely declined to comment for this story, but Dan Bifano, a master rosarian and longtime gardener to Streisand, Oprah and other famous folk, believes a rose’s name “is always of utmost importance; it makes the rose salable or unsalable, and anytime a rose is connected to a celebrity, it’s going to pick up the sales.”
For instance, Barbra Streisand, a fragrant mauve rose bred by then-Weeks Roses hybridizer Tom Carruth, is still selling strong more than 20 years after it was introduced in 2001, Bifano said. So there’s little question the singer-actor-director’s connection will increase interest.
Carruth agrees, but the storied rose breeder, who’s now curator of the rose garden at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanic Garden, said Barbra’s Baby has enough special qualities to make it stand out regardless of its name.
For one, he said, it comes from a fragrant red rose known as Lasting Love, bred by French hybridizer Michel Adam. “When it was introduced, every breeder jumped on it for its bloodlines because of its fragrance and foliage,” Carruth said.
Streisand’s huge rose collection includes about a dozen bushes of Lasting Love, Bifano said, including two outside the living room window of her main house. And that’s where a luscious bubble-gum-pink flower was discovered on a bush that usually produces blooms so deep red they’re nearly burgundy.
In the rose world, these mutant flowers are known as “sports.” Producing a sport is not uncommon, but usually the sport is not as interesting or vital as the mother plant, Carruth said, so there’s little interest in nurturing the mutant into a separate plant.
In another garden, Bifano discovered a Lasting Love bush that produced a pure white sport, but no one wanted to propagate a new white rose, since there are so many already available, Carruth said.
But a vibrant pink rose with a tiny tinge of yellow at the base, with all the excellent qualities of her parent, including vigorous growth and disease resistance? That, Carruth said, was a rose worth pursuing.
Like its parent Lasting Love, Barbra’s Baby “has an intense, wonderful fragrance,” Carruth said, and “foliage so gorgeous [the plant] hardly needs flowers; [the leaves are] a kind of polished mahogany red that turns a brilliant green later.”
Bifano said he called his longtime friend Carruth as soon as he and Streisand spotted the sport. Carruth advised them to watch the branch all summer to see if it had any new pink blooms. And when the particular branch rebloomed pink several times during the season, Carruth came in the fall and took a cutting so the rose could be propagated by a grower in Arizona.
After that, it was a lot of wait and see — growing the cutting and creating more cuttings to see if the rose would consistently produce the same pink flowers, with the same lovely fragrance, foliage, disease resistance and vigor.
The answer, to everyone’s delight, was yes. “We were pleased to see it was stable,” Carruth said, “because a lot of sports want to go back to the parent color.”
As the owner of the parent bush, Streisand gets credit for discovering the rose, and the right to name it. “I told her, ‘Barbra, you’ll be listed as the inventor,’ and that has her just stoked,” Carruth said.
The biggest challenge now is getting the plants potted up for sale this spring. Only two nurseries are expected to sell it this year: April & Ashley, a new online nursery based in Arizona that propagated the plant, and Otto & Sons Nursery in Fillmore, one of the region’s largest wholesale and retail nurseries selling fruit trees, perennials and more than 700 varieties of roses.
Otto & Sons expects to have about 200 of Barbra’s Baby rose bushes to sell in June, said customer service representative Montse Infante, for $58 a plant. The plants currently aren’t listed on its website but will be come June, she said. April & Ashley has the bushes for sale now on its website, for $40 plus $18 shipping (shipping fees waived for three or more bushes).
And if you really want a Streisand collection, you can pick up her namesake rose too. “The Barbra Streisand rose still sells out nearly every year,” Bifano said.
Most of Bifano’s clientele are famous and/or very well-heeled, with large gardens in swanky communities such as Montecito, Malibu and Bel-Air.
He oversees all of Streisand’s gardens, including about 800 roses artfully distributed around her 3-acre property in Malibu. “Color is probably No. 1 in importance to Barbra — color and fragrance — whereas I’m interested in vigor, growth habit, repeat blooms and disease resistance.” The meshing of those priorities created a lush landscape you can glimpse in Streisand’s 2010 book “My Passion for Design,” showcasing the homes and gardens she built and decorated on her ocean-facing property in Malibu.
“One of the things she taught me early on was to extend your interiors into the garden,” Bifano said; when you look out of Streisand’s windows, the colors in the garden match the colors in the room, or the exterior of the structure.
On this day Bifano was delivering the ingredients to his famous organic fertilizer “cocktail” — one bag chicken manure, one bag earthworm castings and two bags Island Custom Landscape Mix (available only at Island Seed & Feed in Goleta) of alfalfa, kelp, soybean, fish and feather meals. Streisand’s three-member garden crew will mix those ingredients on a large tarp to feed all the roses, about three cups per bush.
Bifano also is overseeing the planting of more than 500 special coleus plants around the large red barn — aptly named the Barn — on Streisand’s property. The building is trimmed with white, and its dark red paint has weathered to a near burgundy color. It’s Bifano’s job to find the flowers that will carry on that theme around the outside of the building. The coleus — Proven Winners’ Colorblaze Rediculous — are chosen for their leaves, a deep red burgundy shade almost identical to the Barn’s color.
“She likes a lot of colors — burgundy is her favorite — but you’ll never see some colors, like orange,” Bifano said. Those color choices even extend to the large koi drifting in a large pond in front of the barn — some are cream-colored, one is black and sometimes there’s a deep red one, but never any orange.
No detail is too small for Streisand, “and that’s a good thing,” he said.
“She’s very specific about how she wants things, and if it isn’t right, you have to redo it. She is a perfectionist, and [perfection is] what we try to give her. We’re not always successful, but we try very hard, which is probably why I’ve been around for 30 years. She’s wonderful to work for — she makes you a perfectionist.”
So who knows? The quest for perfection is omnipresent in Streisand’s gardens; maybe her exacting attention to detail somehow rubbed off on the Lasting Love rose just outside her living room window, spurring the creation of an exemplary new bloom worthy of the name Barbra’s Baby.
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