After a Rocky Beginning, a Happy Home for 2,000 Roses

“Do you know how weird it makes you sound, to say you have 2,000 roses?”

Alas, not everyone sees the value of a huge bevy of blooms, laments Edie O’Hair. Even when she joined the Temecula Valley Rose Society, she couldn’t bring herself to reveal how many roses she has.

“They’d say, ‘I thought I’d never get through pruning,’ and they’d have 14 rose bushes to prune.”

One might think a garden with 2,000 anything would need the resources and staff of a government agency. But O’Hair goes it alone. No professional gardeners for her. O’Hair has been known to spend 15 hours a day in her garden, clipping, spraying or just puttering with her plants.

Her favorite rose is the Madame Alfred Carriere, a white and blush-pink bloom with fragrance, a characteristic O’Hair requires of most of her roses.

“Smell that!” O’Hair gasps as a soft breeze stirs up the aroma in her garden. She points to a bush bursting with pink blooms. “Looking up at that big pink rose, that’s what I love: a big pink rose against a blue sky--and no smog!”

O’Hair and husband Mel were pioneers of sorts when they moved six years ago to the hills above Temecula to escape the smog and hassles of city life. Their plan was to surround themselves with a beautiful, well-organized garden, where they could care for their roses, take walks down the rows of flowering plants or relax with a book among the blooms.

“I had such a Pollyanna view of it, I thought, ‘Wow, this is great,’ ” says O’Hair of the first time she eyed the solitary French Tudor home, 2,000 feet up in the Santa Rosa Mountains. “I thought I’d have this beautiful garden like the ones I’ve seen in magazines.”

Unfortunately, she soon discovered that their un-landscaped, 5-acre hill--the place where she was going to create the Garden of Gardens--was “one big rock.”

“I cried for the first two weeks,” O’Hair says.

She was alone much of the time on her brush-covered boulder while Mel traveled on business. And it hit her like a ton of mulch that there was a hundred miles between her and “home,” where her kids were born and her friends lived.

And no longer was she just a phone call away from a pest control company.

“I killed 27 rattlesnakes the first year,” O’Hair says. “I had a rash you wouldn’t believe.” And then there were the gophers--she originally thought they were ground hogs--that ate everything she planted.

Visiting neighbors was out of the question because there were only two other houses visible from the O’Hair homestead when they moved in. And Temecula hadn’t become a city yet, so there were no police or fire stations or many of the conveniences the O’Hairs had known in Arcadia.

“I’d call my husband at work, crying, ‘I can’t stay here,’ ” she says.

Mel would calm his wife, saying, “We’ll put the house on the market.” With that bit of reassurance, Edie O’Hair would look around, see the mountains, the blue sky, breathe in the fresh air and wonder if maybe things weren’t that bad. And things have improved; last year, she killed only three rattlesnakes.

Today O’Hair, looking content and at least a decade younger than her 59 years, has weathered the hardships of mending the soil, getting the upper hand on the reptiles, gophers and coyotes and creating a garden that could make magazine photographers come running.

Designing in an English style--which interweaves roses with shrubs, trees and walkways--the O’Hairs also planted citrus trees, ground covers, drought-resistant plants and flowering shrubs.

“Everything I buy has either flowers for me or berries for the birds to eat,” O’Hair says. “I want to make a sanctuary for the birds.”

She also caters to the rabbits that have taken up residence under the gazebo in the center of the garden, even though they nibble on her plants. Visions of Snow White, surrounded by singing birds and bouncing bunnies, are easily mustered when O’Hair, dressed in a white Victorian lace dress, smiles and speaks melodiously of the flowers and creatures she attends to in her garden.

But Snow, even with seven dwarfs, never had this much responsibility.

“We prune for two months, just like a vineyard,” explains O’Hair, who does much of the work herself. The watering is done by drip irrigation, which minimizes waste. And the additional moisture from the mountain location helps, she says.

“There’s feeding and spraying twice monthly; it takes 400 pounds of rose food for one feeding. When they come into bloom, you do the deadheading (cutting off old flower tops) to encourage new blooms. You don’t want it to go dormant, so you cut them and they’ll bloom again.”

With all her experience, O’Hair doesn’t consider herself an expert. But enough people seek her advice that she’s training to be a consulting rosarian for the American Rose Society.

“I do learn about their origins and backgrounds, but I’m not scientific about roses at all,” she says.

The O’Hairs don’t own a TV set; they don’t take a newspaper. The townspeople know Edie O’Hair as “The Rose Lady.”

“It never occurred to me that people would be interested,” O’Hair says. But after her rose club held a fund-raiser in the garden, she realized people “are so starved to see beauty. It’s a garden different from what other people have.”

The garden is planted in categories: old-fashioned roses, species and hybrid roses. Some are shaped into trees, and the slope of the hill, which more than once has sent her tumbling, sends the rose stems cascading down the hill with an arch of blooms.

“I don’t have all my categories done yet; there are going to be more--about 3,000,” O’Hair says, “and there will always be changes.”

Relaxing beneath an old California oak tree, sipping cool water and looking out over her thousands of blossoms in various shades of red, pink, yellow, white and orange, there’s no question: Edie O’Hair is definitely “home.”