Valentine's Day will be blooming

Pam and Randall Barton of Barton’s Rose Farm at Kalbar.

David Nielsen

WHILE roses might only be on your mind in the days before Valentine's Day Pam and Randall Barton think about them every day.

The couple has been growing roses for 30 years.

Barton's Rose Farm, just north of Kalbar, grows garden roses and a small number of commercial cut roses.

Mrs Barton said the garden rose was an often overlooked Valentine's gift.

"Instead of buying a bunch of flowers, which is terribly romantic, the practical people out there buy a plant," she said.

"It will produce flowers and continue growing flowers."

Mrs Barton said with many people losing gardens during the drought, and  again in last year's flood, a thriving rose plant wasn't as common as it once was.

"With the floods that washed away a lot of gardens in the Lockyer Valley and Ipswich, and because of water restrictions before that, they're not in gardens like they once were," she said.

However, with the Bartons' farm growing roses in the open, rather than in undercover controlled conditions, they saw flowers damaged by recent rains.

"A flower is a delicate thing. If its sitting out in the crashing rain it will get bruised and browned off," Mrs Barton said.

Despite this she said the farm would be covered in blooms in the coming weeks.

The Bartons began their careers as wholesale rose growers to south-east Queensland nurseries. They opened their farm to the public in 1994.

Their farm grows more than 400 varieties of the plant, including garden and commercial cut varieties.