Introduction
There are numberous types of honeysuckles. Most are either large shrubs or twining vines that are noted for their colorful, trumpet-shaped flowers, sweet scent, and attractiveness to butterflies and hummingbirds.
About honeysuckles
Honeysuckle flowers are magnets for hummingbirds; flower colors include orange, red, yellow, and white, depending on the species and variety. Most shrub honeysuckles grow 6 to 15 feet tall and wide, while the vining types grow 10 to 20 feet tall. Honeysuckles bloom in spring to midsummer. Vining forms, such as trumpet honeysuckle (L. sempervirens), grow well on fences, trellises, and walls with support. Shrub forms, such as winter honeysuckle (L. fragrantissima), make good hedges, screens, and mass plantings. Honeysuckles tolerate shade and are often seen as an understory plant in the forest. Some species, such as Tatarian honeysuckle (L. tatarica) and Japanese honeysuckle (L. japonica), are very aggressive and should be avoided.
Special features of honeysuckles
Fragrant
Attracts hummingbirds
Choosing a site to grow honeysuckles
Select a site with full sun to shade and moist, well-drained soil. The plants will flower more profusely in full sun.
Planting Instructions
Plant in spring or fall. Space plants 5 to 15 feet apart, depending on the expected mature size of the plant. Dig a hole only as deep as the root ball and 2 to 3 times as wide. If your soil is in very poor condition, amend the soil you've removed from the hole with a small amount of compost. Otherwise don't amend it at all. Carefully remove the plant from the container and set it in the hole. Fill the hole half full with soil, then water it well to settle the soil and eliminate air pockets. Let the water drain, then fill the remainder of hole with soil and water thoroughly.
Ongoing Care
Apply a layer of compost around the base of the plant each spring, followed by a 2-inch layer of mulch to retain moisture and control weeds. Water plants during the summer if rainfall is less than 1 inch per week. Prune shrubs and vines after flowering. Aggressive varieties can be pruned back to the ground in late winter to control growth.
Frequently Asked Questions about Honeysuckles
The single most useful thing you can do with any honeysuckle is work out which one you have, because the group runs from a well behaved native climber worth planting anywhere to a vine that several states now forbid you to move, and almost every question below turns on that answer.
How do I tell the honeysuckles apart?
- Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica) is a twining vine with paired oval leaves, white flowers that age to yellow so both colors appear at once, a strong evening scent, and black berries. It holds its leaves late into winter or through it, which is one reason it is easy to spot in December. It is one of the most damaging invasive vines in the eastern half of North America.
- Coral honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens) is the native one, and it is genuinely worth having. The flowers are long, narrow, coral to red trumpets carried in whorls at the shoot tips, with little or no scent, and the upper leaves are joined at the base so the stem appears to pass through a single disc. The berries are red.
- Bush honeysuckles (L. maackii, L. tatarica, L. morrowii and the hybrid L. × bella) are upright shrubs rather than vines, leaf out very early in spring before almost anything native does, and have hollow stems, which is the quickest confirmation. Snap a pencil thick twig; a hollow pith means one of the invasive bush species.
- Goldflame honeysuckle (Lonicera × heckrottii) is a twining garden hybrid with deep pink buds opening to yellow throats. It is one of the well behaved ones, it flowers over a long season, and it is worth keeping. Note that 'Goldflame' is also one of the most widely sold Spiraea japonica cultivars, which is a shrub rather than a vine and is invasive across much of the east, so the name alone does not tell you what you have.
Cape honeysuckle, sold in warm climates, is Tecoma capensis and is not a Lonicera at all. It belongs to a different family and needs different care from anything on this page.
There is wild honeysuckle growing on land near us. When should I dig some up and move it closer to the house?
Before the timing question there is an identification question, and in most of the country it changes the answer completely.
A honeysuckle vine growing wild in zone 6, unplanted and thriving in rough ground, is far more likely to be Japanese honeysuckle than anything else. That plant smothers shrubs, girdles young trees as it twines, and forms mats that stop woodland regenerating. Several states list it as a noxious or restricted weed, and where it is listed, moving it, planting it, or passing it to somebody else is not simply unwise, it is against the law. The bush honeysuckles that colonize the same ground are regulated in a similar way in a growing list of states.
If it turns out to be an invasive one, the answer is not to move it. Check your own state's current regulated plant list, which your county extension office keeps and can tell you over the phone in a minute. Then buy a native or well behaved alternative rather than transplanting the problem to your foundation, where it will seed into the neighborhood by way of birds. Coral honeysuckle is the direct substitute for the same site and it feeds hummingbirds. The named garden hybrids such as 'Dropmore Scarlet' and 'Goldflame' are also non invasive. If you want the scent, a named selection of Lonicera periclymenum, the European woodbine, gives you fragrance without the habits of the Japanese species.
If you have positively identified it as coral honeysuckle or another native, the timing question is straightforward. Move it while it is dormant and the soil is workable, which in zone 6 usually means late March or early April before growth starts, or in fall once the leaves drop. Cool, damp weather is the whole point, since the plant loses roots in the move and needs a spell where the top is not demanding much water.
Take a wider root ball than you think you need. A plant that has grown wild in competition with everything around it has a deeper and wider root system than a nursery plant of the same size, because it has had to hunt for water rather than being handed it. Cut the top back by about a third at the same time so there is less foliage than the reduced root system has to support, and water it deeply once a week through its first summer.
My honeysuckle flowers well every year but the leaves keep dropping, especially low down. Is something wrong?
Some of this is normal and some is worth investigating, and you can tell them apart by looking at the leaves before they fall.
The normal version is straightforward. Climbing honeysuckles carry their flowers on the current season's growth at the top and outside of the plant, and they shed their oldest leaves as the season goes on, which leaves the base bare and woody while the top is in full flower. A plant producing vigorous new shoots and flowering on them is a healthy plant with an unattractive lower half.
The version worth investigating shows different symptoms. If the leaves go yellow, develop a dusty white coating, curl, or drop from the middle of the plant rather than only the very bottom, you are probably looking at powdery mildew, honeysuckle aphid, or both, and they are the commonest cause of a honeysuckle stripping itself in midsummer.
- Powdery mildew shows as a whitish film on the upper leaf surface. It thrives on plants that are dry at the root and stagnant in the air, which describes a honeysuckle trained flat against a warm wall almost perfectly. The fix is cultural rather than chemical: water deeply at the base in dry spells, thin the plant so air moves through it, and clear fallen leaves rather than leaving them underneath.
- Honeysuckle aphid causes distorted, bunched, stunted shoot tips, sometimes described as witches' broom, with heavy leaf drop behind them. It is worst on some of the bush honeysuckles and on stressed plants. A strong jet of water knocks colonies off, and cutting out the worst affected shoots removes both the aphids and the ugly growth in one operation. If you also find white insects that stain green when squished, those are honeysuckle aphids rather than mites, the green being the plant juice they have been feeding on. Insecticidal soap works if you coat the stems and the leaf undersides, following its label, repeated every two to three weeks while the infestation lasts, with a strong hosing of the whole plant in between to knock off both pests and their honeydew.
In either case, renewal pruning is the treatment that fixes the look of the plant. In late winter or early spring, take out a proportion of the oldest stems right down to near ground level. New shoots come from the base to replace them, so instead of a bare woody trunk with a heap of foliage on top, you build a plant clothed from the bottom. Doing about a quarter to a third of the old stems each year keeps a mature plant permanently renewed without ever losing a season of flowers.
How hard can I cut a honeysuckle back, and when?
That depends on which one it is, and getting it wrong costs you a year of flowers.
Box honeysuckle, Lonicera nitida, takes as hard a cut as you can give it. This is the small leaved shrubby species used for low hedging and topiary, and it responds to renovation better than almost anything else grown for the same purpose. Cutting a neglected plant down to about a foot above the ground in early spring, before growth starts, is standard practice, and it breaks freely from the old wood and rebuilds a dense plant. Through summer you can shear it as often as you like to hold the shape; in a mild coastal climate two or three shearings a season is normal. The main thing to avoid is a hard cut so late in the year that the soft regrowth is caught by frost.
That tolerance does not carry across the group. The climbing species divide into two, and they are pruned in opposite ways.
- Those that flower on the current season's growth, including Lonicera japonica, L. × heckrottii and the late Dutch honeysuckle L. periclymenum 'Serotina', can be cut back hard in late winter and will still flower that summer.
- Those that flower on last year's wood, including the early Dutch honeysuckle 'Belgica' and many early flowering species, set their flower buds the previous season. Cut those hard in spring and you remove the whole year's flowers. Prune them straight after they finish flowering instead, which gives the plant the rest of the season to build next year's wood.
If you do not know which group a climber belongs to, prune it lightly just after it flowers. That timing is safe for both.
My goldflame has swallowed the arbor and flowers only at the top. How do I get it back?
A vine that is bare at the base and flowering out of reach has been tipped back rather than renewed, and tipping is what caused it. Because goldflame flowers on the current season's growth, it can be cut hard and still bloom the same summer. You have two ways to do it, and the choice is about how much you need the arbor to keep doing its job.
Cut it all back at once if you can live with a bare framework for a few weeks. In late winter or very early spring, while it is still bare and before the buds swell, take the whole vine down to a low framework roughly two feet above the ground. It looks like a disaster on the day. Within weeks it pushes vigorous shoots from buds along the remaining wood, it flowers on that growth by midsummer, and it covers the arbor again by fall. One rough spring buys you a plant clothed from the bottom.
Take out a third of the oldest stems each year if the arbor is the only shade over somewhere you sit. Each late winter for three years, cut the thickest, oldest, least productive stems right down at ground level and leave the younger ones to carry the cover and the flowers. Year one barely shows. By year three the last of the old wood is gone and the whole framework is young. It takes longer and you never lose the shade.
Either way, avoid tipping the ends back and calling it pruning, since shortening the tips is what produced the bare base in the first place.
Then pull out the dead mat in the middle by hand once the live stems are cut back, and expect more of it than you think. Years of growth over an arbor leave a thick layer of dead stems trapped inside the living ones. It holds moisture against the live wood, keeps light off the base of the plant, and is where powdery mildew starts every year. Clearing it is the difference between a renovation that holds and one that grows back into the same tangle.
Summer work is useful and low risk on this plant. Shear off the spent flower clusters after the first flush, taking the faded heads rather than cutting into the stem, and it will come again and sometimes a third time. Shorten any shoot reaching across a path or into your face as it grows. Stop cutting hard by late summer so the regrowth has time to firm up before cold weather.
Pruning above your head is where people get hurt. Work from stable footing, never reach sideways from a ladder with loppers, and drop the vine down to where you can reach it before trying to do detailed work in the air.
I moved a small honeysuckle two weeks ago and it is wilting although the soil is not dry. What went wrong?
Wilting in soil that is not dry is a root problem rather than a water problem, and there are four usual causes.
The first, and the one most often missed, is that the surrounding soil is wet while the original root ball is bone dry. A root ball that has dried out once, particularly a peat based nursery one, repels water afterward. Irrigation runs down the gap between the root ball and the backfill and away, and the roots that actually feed the plant sit dry in the middle of damp ground. Push a finger, or better a thin bamboo cane, into the root ball itself rather than into the backfill beside it, and judge from that. If it is dry, water slowly and directly over the root ball until it takes up water again.
The second is planting depth. If soil now covers the point where the stems flare out into roots, the plant is too deep, and on a shrub or small tree that produces exactly this slow decline. Scrape the soil back and check that the flare sits at or slightly above the finished grade.
The third is the amended hole. Digging a hole in heavier ground and filling it with a much lighter improved mix creates a basin that collects water and holds it around the roots with nowhere to drain, and roots also tend to circle inside the comfortable pocket rather than leaving it. Backfill with the soil you dug out and put the improvement on the surface as mulch instead.
The fourth is the fertilizer. Applying fertilizer to a plant that has just lost part of its root system does not help it, and slow release granules concentrated in the planting hole can burn the damaged roots that are left. There is nothing wrong with the plant that fertilizer fixes.
So check the root ball, correct the depth if it is wrong, then water deeply, meaning a slow soak that wets the whole root zone, and let the surface dry before the next one rather than watering a little every day. Do not add anything else. Honeysuckles are naturally happier on the dry side than most shrubs. Leave the pruning of dead wood until the plant is clearly growing again and you can see what is genuinely dead.
Will a goldflame do well long term in a container, and can I protect it from deer?
In a container it will do well for a few years and then need more root room, and five gallons is on the small side to start with. It is a proper climber that wants to reach ten to fifteen feet, so give it a trellis or obelisk set into the pot at planting rather than added later.
Container culture comes down to three things. Water: the roots cannot go looking, so you supply all of it, which in hot weather may be daily. Water until it runs from the drainage holes, then let the top inch dry before the next one, and do not stand the pot in a saucer of water. Feeding: nutrients wash out of a container every time you water, so a potted plant does need feeding in a way one in the ground does not. A diluted liquid feed every three or four weeks through the growing season at the label rate, or a controlled release fertilizer applied once in spring, both work, and you stop feeding by late summer so growth hardens before cold weather. Root room: when roots come out of the drainage holes and the pot dries out within a day, either move up to a larger container or take the plant out, cut an inch or two off the outside and bottom of the root mass, and replant into the same pot with fresh mix. Left pot bound too long it will thin, flower less and become impossible to keep watered. A pot of at least fifteen to twenty gallons is a realistic long term home.
A pot in a cold winter is a harder place than the ground, because roots have no soil mass insulating them and sit at close to air temperature. In a mild coastal or mountain climate that is rarely an issue; where winters are cold, move the pot against a sheltered wall or into an unheated garage for the worst of it.
On deer, do not rely on the plant being unpalatable. Honeysuckle is usually rated as only occasionally damaged rather than deer proof, and under constant heavy pressure that rating means very little. Deer sample new growth, and a young plant in a pot presents its new growth at exactly the convenient height. Repellent sprays help for a while, need reapplying after rain and after every flush of growth, and deer get used to any one of them. The only thing that reliably works is a physical barrier: a cage of wire fencing around the plant while it establishes, or siting the pot inside a fenced area or on a deck the deer do not use.
Can honeysuckle be grown indoors as a houseplant?
Not successfully, and the reason is light rather than anything more subtle. Honeysuckles are sun plants. Indoors, even in a bright south window, the light is a fraction of what the plant gets outside, and the result is a thin, pale, drawn out plant with long gaps between the leaves and few or no flowers. On top of that these are large twining climbers that want to run a good many feet and need something to climb, and most expect a cold winter rest that a heated room does not provide. Plants held indoors under those conditions also pick up spider mites reliably, because warm dry air suits mites and a struggling plant has little resistance.
If what you want is a scented flowering climber for a bright room, jasmine and stephanotis are far better suited. If you want honeysuckle scent, the plant belongs by a door or a window that opens, outdoors, where you meet it on the way past on a summer evening.
Are honeysuckle berries poisonous?
The honest answer is more measured than a flat yes. Honeysuckles are not among the seriously dangerous garden plants. The berries of a number of ornamental species, including the bush honeysuckles and Lonicera xylosteum, contain saponins and can cause vomiting, diarrhea and stomach pain if a quantity is eaten, and small children are the ones most likely to eat a quantity of attractive berries. An arbor is worth a particular thought here, because it puts fruit at exactly the height a child reaches. The flowers of Lonicera japonica are used in tea in parts of East Asia, so the plant is not uniformly toxic.
The sensible position is the one that applies to most ornamentals. The berries are not food, nobody should eat them, and if a child or a pet does swallow some, call poison control or your veterinarian and describe what was eaten rather than waiting to see what happens. That is a reason to teach the rule about not eating things from the garden, not a reason to avoid growing the plant.
Japanese honeysuckle and poison ivy are taking over our acreage. Is there something I can plant that will outcompete them?
No, and it is worth saying plainly before anything else, because planting into an uncontrolled infestation wastes money and usually adds a third problem to the two you have. Nothing you can plant will outcompete established Japanese honeysuckle or poison ivy. Both are deep rooted, both resprout from root fragments, both are spread further by birds eating the fruit, and both will simply grow over whatever you plant among them. Groundcover has a role, but it comes after control rather than instead of it, as a way of holding cleared ground and slowing reinfestation.
Deal with the poison ivy safely before you deal with anything else. Every part of poison ivy carries urushiol, the oil that causes the rash, and it is present on the bare stems and roots in winter as well as on the leaves in summer. The oil stays active on tools, gloves, boots and clothing for a long time, and a great many rashes come from handling contaminated gear days later rather than from the plant itself. Work covered up, use disposable or dedicated gloves, wash tools, wash clothing separately and promptly, and wash skin as soon as you can with soap and cold water or a product made for removing the oil.
Never burn poison ivy, and never put it on a bonfire with brush. Urushiol is carried in the smoke, and inhaling it causes severe internal irritation of the airways and lungs that is a medical emergency, quite unlike a skin rash. This is the single most important sentence on this page. A rash that covers a large area, involves the face or genitals, blisters severely, or comes with any difficulty breathing needs medical attention rather than calamine lotion.
For the vines themselves, the method that works is cut stump treatment rather than spraying a tangle. Spraying a foliar herbicide at a mass of vine climbing through shrubs and up trees is both ineffective, because most of the spray never reaches enough leaf area, and destructive, because it lands on everything you are trying to keep. Instead, cut each vine through near the ground and treat the cut surface of the rooted stump immediately, within a minute or two while it is still taking up liquid. That puts a small, targeted amount of product exactly where it does the work, in the root system, and almost none of it in the wider environment.
Late summer and early fall is the best window, because the plant is moving reserves downward into the roots then and carries the treatment with it. Triclopyr is the usual choice for woody vines and has the advantage of not harming grasses, which matters if you are cutting through a grassy area. Glyphosate also works. Either way the label is the legal instruction: it must list the site you are treating, you must follow the rate and the protective equipment it specifies, and if any part of your acreage runs down to a creek, pond or wet ditch, you need a product specifically labeled for use near water. Cut vines left hanging in the canopy will die in place; pulling them down rips bark and branches, so leave them.
Expect to go back. Both plants resprout, and control on this scale is a program over two or three seasons rather than a single afternoon. Repeated cutting and grubbing alone will exhaust the roots eventually if you are diligent, and smothering cut ground with cardboard under a heavy mulch works well on open areas. Your county extension office can put together a plan for the specific mix of ground you have, and that call is free.
One point bears directly on leaving land wild for wildlife. Invasive honeysuckle looks like a benefit to birds because it fruits heavily and the birds eat it. The research says otherwise: honeysuckle berries are high in sugar and low in the fat that migrating birds actually need, so they are a poor substitute for native fruit, and birds that nest in honeysuckle thickets suffer higher nest predation because the shrubs branch low and give predators easy access. Clearing it and letting native shrubs and trees return does more for the wildlife on your land than leaving it alone does. That is the argument for the work, not just tidiness.
Which honeysuckles survive a zone 6 winter like southeast Alaska's?
Three good candidates, all vigorous. Lonicera brownii climbs 9 or 10 feet with bluish-green leaves and scarlet tubular flowers running until hard frost. Winter honeysuckle, L. fragrantissima, is a deciduous shrub whose small creamy flowers are inconspicuous but intensely fragrant. Trumpet honeysuckle, L. sempervirens, is a twining native vine with orange to scarlet trumpets in late spring and early summer. All three grow aggressively in a cool maritime climate, so plan on a firm annual pruning to keep them off their neighbors; managed that way they stay compact and floriferous.
White insects have been on my honeysuckle all summer and soapy spray has not stopped them. What are they?
If they stain green when squashed, they are honeysuckle aphids, and the green is the plant juice they have been drinking; they commonly deform new growth on Lonicera. Spray insecticidal soap so it coats stems and leaf undersides, repeating every two to three weeks if they return, and between sprays hose the whole plant hard, driving water deep into the foliage. The hosing removes aphids and their honeydew, and it suppresses any mites sharing the plant, since mites prosper in hot dry stillness.
My neighbor drains chlorinated pool water onto my planting. What is it doing to the soil?
Less chlorine damage than you would think, and more salt. Free chlorine gasses off quickly; what accumulates is chloride and sodium salt left as the water evaporates, plus a raised pH from the water chemistry, and the leaf drop and branch death you see are salt and pH stress. Divert the water if at all possible. Then leach: heavy applications of fresh water move the salts down and out where drainage allows, and after rain in poorly drained ground, slow additional watering keeps them moving. A soil lab test for soluble salts and sodium tells you exactly where you stand, and where sodium dominates, gypsum helps displace it from soil particles so it can leach. Extension can advise for your area, and note that discharging pool water onto neighboring property violates local water-discharge rules in many places.
