The weather for the last few days has been as gray and sticky as the slugs it seems to generate. The most pervasive scent in my dripping garden is the smell of honeysuckle drifting over from the neighbors’ yard. I let my nose revel in the sweet fragrance, even though I have done my best to eradicate any wayward honeysuckle that has strayed over the fence that divides the two properties. The honeysuckle is the white and yellow-flowered Hall’s variety—Lonicera japonica’Halliana’—and it is notoriously invasive. When it comes to dealing with Japanese honeysuckle, the best strategy is to use the enticing scent as an early warning system, allowing you to locate and destroy the plants before they spread. Hall’s honeysuckle is like the femme fatale in a hard-boiled detective story—lovely and invariably dangerous.
Equally lovely, but without the invasive baggage is a gorgeous small rose, ‘Baby Faurax,’ currently starring on my side of the fence. This shrub, which my husband nicknamed ‘Baby Clorox’ when he gave it to me many years ago, does not fade or ball up in the wet weather as some of its flashier relations do. It does not droop either. It simply goes on blooming, in all its blue-purple splendor, putting other, larger roses to shame. The slugs may stampede through the hostas in this steamy weather, but ‘Baby Faurax’ blooms on, untroubled by black spot or browned petals. A survivor of the Roaring Twenties, it is still the life of the party, long after the repeal of Prohibition.
‘Baby Faurax’ is a native of France, born in Lille and introduced in 1924. It is part of a rose group known as the “polyanthas,” from the Latin words for “many” and “flowers.” Polyantha roses are generally small to mid size shrubs that bear clusters of rosette or pompom-shaped blooms. In the case of ‘Baby Faurax,’ those flower clusters are an unusual shade of blue-tinged violet. The individual blossoms have about twenty petals apiece, each boasting a white central eye zone. The flowers are roughly an inch and a half across, clustered tightly atop stems that are upholstered with small, ruddy prickles. The prickles, while impossible to avoid, are not terribly sharp or intimidating, at least in my opinion.
I love to delve into the mysteries of rose parentage, and ‘Baby Faurax’ is a genuine enigma. The polyantha class of roses is the result of long-ago breeding efforts involving crosses between China roses and dwarf versions of Rosa multiflora. Most of us are familiar with the standard-size multiflora rose It is the white “wild rose” that you see in untended spaces everywhere at this time of the year, covered with hundreds of small, five-petaled white flowers. Multifloras are fragrant and extremely attractive to pollinators, but nearly as invasive as honeysuckle. The shrubs tend to form thickets, outcompeting native species. Those in charge of botanical gardens, arboreta and public parks do everything in their power to make them unwelcome.
This is not the case with their better-mannered offspring, the polyanthas. One probable polyantha hybrid, the blue-purple-flowered climber ‘Veilchenblau,’ introduced in Germany in 1909, may be a parent of ‘Baby Faurax’. The two varieties share flower form, clustering habit and the presence of white markings on some petals. Most prominently, they also share the singular purple coloring. DNA testing would undoubtedly ferret out the truth, but on the surface, ‘Veilchenblau’ bears a greater resemblance to ‘Baby Faurax’ than any other rose.
In this era of small space gardening, ‘Baby Faurax’ is perfect for limited pieces of ground or container culture. Grown in-ground, mine has reached a mature height of about three feet tall and two feet wide. It could easily be kept smaller, however, by pruning back the canes by one third at the end of each flush of bloom. The blue-purple flower clusters stay on the bush, rather than falling off and they last a long time. The blooms also hold up very well in cut flower arrangements, which is not something you can say about all garden roses.
‘Baby Faurax,’ which is lightly scented, also plays very well with others. Mine grows in a decidedly mixed planting scheme and I notice that it harmonizes beautifully with white-flowered Nigella damascena or love-in-a-mist. Purples and silvers go so well together that I can also imagine it paired with fluffy mounds of Artemisia ‘Powis Castle’ or a carpet of lamb’s ears. It occurs to me that my rose-loving father would have planted the little rose in the front of a dedicated rose bed, edged with masses of the fragrant herb, sweet alyssum, in purple and white. I haven’t bought any sweet alyssum in years, but in honor of Father’s Day, I just might buy some and plant it at the feet of ‘Baby Faurax.’
You can’t find ‘Baby Faurax’ in any old big box store, but you can find it at Rogue Valley Roses in Oregon. Their website, http://www.roguevalleyroses.com is a treasure trove of wonderful antique varieties, including the aforementioned ‘Veilchenblau.’ If you have the space, you might plant both, for a dramatic parent and child reunion.