Dan Bifano is in a hurry, but it’s in his nature to be gracious, so he keeps his countenance serene even though gnarly traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway has made his visitors very late.
“I was afraid I would be late too,” he confides, glancing at his watch, “because I had to make a quick stop at Lady Gaga’s.”
The comment is offhand, meant to soothe rather than impress because Bifano works with the rich and famous every day as a master rosarian and garden designer. His only advertising is word of mouth, and his longtime clients include Oprah, Barbra Streisand, Tom Ford and other Montecito-Malibu-area people so private he can’t name them because of nondisclosure agreements.
He politely guffaws at the idea of a regular person like, say, this reporter, calling him for a consultation, but then hastily explains it’s because he really can’t take on any more clients. He’ll be 75 in July, Bifano says, and he’s trying to cut back so he and his husband can spend more time with their children and grandchildren.
Bifano says he’s even cutting back on another passion: cycling. He used to ride 100 miles a week. “But now I only do about 75,” he said. “I’m getting old.”
He says this seriously, even though he’s striding around Streisand’s 3-acre property like a leggy teenager. He’s tall and so lean his skinny jeans look more like a necessity than a fashion statement. He’s wearing a basic pocket T-shirt, remarkable only for its color (raspberry), a thin gray zip-up hoodie and a pair of colorful slip-on Vans that quietly tie the whole ensemble together. His salt-and-pepper hair is close-cropped like an athlete’s, “because it’s all falling out,” he laughed.
On this day in mid-March, he’s delivering the ingredients for his famous organic fertilizer “cocktail” to clients around Malibu and Santa Monica, which will be used to feed Streisand’s collection of more than 800 roses. He’s left a big stack of bags near the gate, and needs to make one more stop at Tom Ford’s home before he drives back to his own home in Santa Barbara that night.
In Streisand’s extraordinary garden, color and fragrance are paramount, Bifano said. While many features look natural or aged, like a stacked-stone bridge over the burbling stream, beside a large pond with a giant water wheel, there is nothing that’s random or unplanned because Streisand is precise about what she wants.
In March, however, the garden is just emerging from winter. The perfectly pruned roses are just beginning to leaf out and the plants in the vegetable garden are seedlings. There’s still much to be done, such as planting more than 500 burgundy coleus around one of the elaborate, custom-made structures on the property known as the “Barn,” so named because it resembles an old-fashioned red barn on the outside. The plants were carefully chosen by Bifano to be an almost exact match to its weathered, dark red paint because Streisand believes colors in the garden should match the exterior of the buildings, and/or be an extension of the colors inside.
Her vision is exacting, and usually nonnegotiable, and it’s Bifano’s job to make it happen. Which suits him just fine, since he leans that way himself.
When you’re aiming for perfection, even the smallest details count.
“It’s like a movie set,” Bifano said, gesturing to the elegant barn, brook, bridges and all the plants that tie them together. On that chilly March day, his goal was “to have everything perfect by her birthday” on April 24.
That’s not something Streisand demands, Bifano emphasizes later. It’s just something he puts on himself, and one of the main reasons his services are in such high demand.
Most of Bifano’s clients are well-heeled, with large gardens in swanky communities such as Montecito, Malibu and Bel-Air, but in truth, he said, his gardening venture is more passion than business.
Bifano grew up in Montecito and got a degree in political science. He thought he’d be a teacher, but soon discovered the classroom wasn’t for him, so he invested in multifamily housing with his father. The income from those investments left him free to pursue the passion he developed when he was 9, when his family moved from Indianapolis to a home in Montecito formerly owned by a UC Santa Barbara botany professor.
The property included a formal rose garden with 100 roses, he said. “That’s where my real love for roses began, and I’ve had roses ever since.”
Bifano threw himself into the study of roses, becoming a consulting rosarian through the American Rose Society, and one of the first three master rosarian’s for the society’s Southwest District when the designation was created in 2004. Like his good friend Tom Carruth, the famed rose breeder who now oversees the Huntington’s rose garden, Bifano is a walking encyclopedia of roses, ready for details about every rose we pass in the garden, from its origin and breeder to its ability to withstand disease.
Unlike Carruth, Bifano has never been interested in breeding roses. His focus has always been on admiration and display, which he said is easy in Santa Barbara, which he considers the best rose-growing region in the U.S. “They start blooming here now [in April] and they’ll be blooming until Christmas, and you just can’t do that anywhere else. In L.A., you have the summer heat that will just cook your roses, but we don’t have that here.”
His gardening business began by accident in 1979, when he began volunteering at the A.C. Postel Memorial Rose Garden in Santa Barbara’s Mission Historical Park. The city’s park maintenance budget had been slashed after Proposition 13 froze property tax revenues in 1978, and the rose garden was beginning to deteriorate, Bifano said, so he lobbied the city council for funding to restore it. They got a grant of $50,000 from the Elizabeth Firth Wade Foundation — “a lot of money at that time” — and Bifano went to work.
By the mid-1980s, “The rose garden came back beautifully, and I’ve been involved there [as a volunteer] ever since,” he said, although in recent years his biggest involvement has been leading hands-on rose-pruning demonstrations every January to get the all the roses pruned — roughly 1,500 in all. (The city of Santa Barbara’s Annual Rose Pruning Day is advertised on Instagram @sbparksandrec and attracts 100 to 150 people every year.)
It was publicity about the restoration that led to his first private gardening gig in the late 1980s — a wealthy client wanted him to create a rose garden as a Christmas gift for her husband. It turned out so well, she asked him to create another, and soon her friends were calling him with requests for gardens of their own. After Streisand saw one of his gardens, she had her assistant call him to request his help with her property in Malibu. And other celebrities followed suit.
His focus is on creating and maintaining large-scale rose gardens. “I certainly would work for people who are not wealthy,” he said, “but gardens with 200 [roses] is kind of minimum for me; 500 is the average and some are well over 1,000 — I’ve created seven rose gardens for Oprah — so you’re talking about a lot of money, not just for installation but for maintenance. It takes a lot of manpower to take care of 500 roses, or even 200 roses. I tell people, 200 roses are going to take eight hours a week that are concentrated on nothing else but the roses.”
Bifano doesn’t have his own garden crew — “I have people who work for me in my apartment buildings, and that’s enough.” Instead he works with contractors he respects after many years of doing projects with them.
They do most of the physical work these days, under his guidance, but Bifano still makes the rounds at his client’s gardens. By late April, when the roses start blooming, they’ve already been pruned and fertilized, but Bifano is always on the prowl for any signs of disease or pests.
Vigilance and quick action are especially important here because Bifano only uses organic control methods, so no chemical pesticides or herbicides. His approach to removing aphids, for instance, is to bring out a small paint brush as soon as they’re spotted, to literally sweep them off the plants. “My neighbors think I’m nuts, they think I’m painting my roses red,” he said, laughing. “But if you just knock them off when they first appear, they stay away. If you wait until they’re packed on [the stem], they start to ooze sticky stuff and then it’s too late.”
Bifano said he doesn’t have a “typical” client. Some are pickier than others, “although nobody’s as particular as Barbra … she’s always a challenge and that’s one of the reasons I love working for her.”
But in general, he said, “I find billionaires the easiest to work with because they tend to not have the time to get directly involved. They give me an idea of what they want and I do it, and for the most part, they tend to be happy.”
For instance, one wealthy client wanted a rose garden with blooms that matched her home decor. “She didn’t even meet me. She just said, ‘Go inside and pick roses that match my interiors,’ and it was easy because everything was pink and flowered. I put in a large rose garden with nothing but pink roses and she was thrilled.”
Another longtime client sold her mansion and moved into a 3,000-square-foot condominium on top of a 41-story tower. She wanted a big rose garden inside her house, he said, “and it was almost like a terrarium. It was gorgeous when it bloomed.” But because the garden was all enclosed, the roses never got proper ventilation and always developed problems. “I redid her garden three times before she gave up. We’d tear one out and put in another, wasting a great deal of money hauling soil and plants up 40 floors in an elevator. … But it was hard to say no to this wonderful woman.”
Bifano insists there aren’t any secret tips for working with the rich. “They’re just the people who tend to hire me,” he said. “If you have a good work ethic and know what you’re talking about, you will please any client and that’s what I try to do.”
Besides, Bifano said, “I try not to think of them as celebrities. I think of them as people who love roses.”
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