Meet the Maker: Rose of 8Days Farm

Long before she had a flower-farm, Rose opened her first business: a pedicure shop with a loyal, if not entirely willing, clientele and a menu of custom poultices and potions. Appointments were not optional. "I'd require my family to come," she says, laughing.

The shop was in her family's backyard in Maryland and she was a little girl. Her ingredients were whatever she could pick in the yard, and her quality control was still a work in progress. Months later, her mother found one of the potions under the kitchen counter, "fully grown with God knows what."

Making things was part of her family life. Both of her parents loved to cook, and her Norwegian mother turned every holiday into a feast with homemade jam and fancy drinks made with rosemary and lemon. “Crafting and the joy of being in the kitchen was a huge part of our holidays,” Rose says.

Rose left Maryland for college in Vermont, a place of green mountains, thick forests and old farming traditions, and it turned out to be the right place for her as someone who was fated to one day build her life around plants.

She took a job on a medicinal herb farm founded by the daughter of Rosemary Gladstar, a legendary woman who is often called the godmother of modern American herbalism. Rose knew very little about herbs at the time, but she had come back from a semester in India with stomach trouble that wouldn’t go away. When she began drinking dandelion root tea and her stomach slowly improved, she was curious.

What truly inspired her, though, was scent. Rose went on to spend two years at an aromatherapy apothecary in Vermont that carried more than 300 essential oils, where she came to know nearly every fragrant plant imaginable and saw how different aromas could change the way people felt. She earned her aromatherapy certification before studying herbalism with Gladstar herself.

Over those years, Rose developed the idea that now sits at the heart of 8Days. “Scent, above any other sense, can bring you back to a moment instantly,” she says, “sometimes one that you’ve even forgotten.”

She also learned that plants could offer much more than a pleasant smell. Dandelion had helped her body heal, and rose later helped her through a time of grief. “I started to see how these plants weren’t just providing some ordinary sensory pleasure,” she says. “They were actually having profound impacts.”

Through Gladstar, Rose found her way to California and into a career as a cosmetic chemist, helping bring products to stores like Target and Whole Foods. The work taught her how to turn plants into formulas that feel good, stay fresh and work the way they promise.

It also showed her how far most ingredients travel, and how many hands they pass through, before they reach a bottle. She wanted to know where a sprig of lavender came from, when it was grown and how it was handled, and no one could tell her.

Then her family bought a horse and cattle farm in Sonoma County and slowly turned it into a flower farm. Rose and her sister Emily, a botanist and longtime farmer, decided to run it together. Their mother, Susan, manages the greenhouse, and their father, Brian, tends the fields and jokingly calls himself “the janitor.”

The farm was intended to supply florists, but florists accept only flawless blooms, and on a half acre of roses, many fell short. Rose found herself carrying armfuls of fragrant damask roses to the compost pile, and she could not bear to see them go to waste.

So she did what the little girl in the backyard would have done. She made something. She began distilling the discarded roses into a rose water and refining the formula over time.

Rose blended her rose water with rose absolute and sandalwood and shared the spray with friends and family. Everyone loved it, and it “took off like crazy.” That, she says, was the moment she realized, “maybe I can leave my full-time job. Maybe this is a real business.”

8Days has grown every year since. Today the farm still supplies florists with fresh-cut flowers and has also become a setting for small gatherings and events. When our team visited, Rose’s sister had celebrated her wedding there just days before, among the Dahlias.

Rose uses what she makes, every single day. Her mornings start with a full skincare routine, and throughout the day she mists her face with the Love Spray or orange blossom water. Many people think a morning moisturizer is enough, she explains, but skin “really wants to drink up,” especially in a dry climate. Her evenings are just as deliberate. Most nights end with a bath, a few scoops of bath soak, body oil, body butter on any dry spots and a face mask. “I’m a huge personal care geek,” she says.

That routine is also her testing ground for what comes next. Rose is developing a skincare line that she considers a kind of graduation, drawing on everything she has learned over the past decade.

In many ways, the Rosé Ritual is her evening routine, gathered into a single box. It has the rose water she mists to set the mood, the beeswax candle she lights, the bath soak she sinks into and the body butter she smooths on afterward. The one addition is a glass of our Brut Rosé, which Rose happily calls “the best part.”

Rose approached the Rosé Ritual the way she approaches her formulas. As she says of her body butter, “Every ingredient has a purpose.”

The Love Spray This damask rose water is warm and rounded rather than sugary, layered with rose absolute and sandalwood. Mist it into the room or onto your face for an energetic reset.

The Beeswax Candle Made from beeswax, a natural wax produced by honeybees, this candle burns more slowly and cleanly than other waxes, casting a soft, honeyed glow and a delicate natural fragrance.

The Bath Soak A blend of sea salt, Dead Sea mineral salt and Epsom salt infused with calendula, lavender and rose petals, which float to the surface and unfurl as you sink in.

The Love Body Butter 8Days’ best seller completes the ritual. It is made with six plant butters, including Brazilian cupuaçu infused with fresh rose petals, along with rosehip seed oil and jojoba. Smooth it on while your skin is still slightly damp.

The Wine A bottle of Domaine Carneros 2022 Brut Rosé rounds out the set. Rose calls pouring a glass “the best part.”

Read Rose’s suggested routine for the Rosé Ritual, from the first mist of rose water to the last sip of Brut Rosé.