Enjoy honeysuckle's 'intoxicating' scent at night

by How Does Your Garden Grow? By Sharon Daniels

On a warm summer evening, whether you take a leisurely drive on a country road with windows down or sit on your porch near a stand of wild honeysuckle, you may experience what often is called an “intoxicating” scent.

If you have dealt with honeysuckle, you may call it aggressive, rampant, vigorous or thuggy. It certainly is a dependable flowering vine, strong enough that you can cut it down and next spring you'll find it twining again.

It easily becomes invasive because its dense growth can crowd out desirable plants. It grows two to three feet every year, but often it will be more.

Nearly every year I try to clear at least some of it from a long forsythia hedge where it has thrived because I failed to remove some every year. Winter or very early spring is a decent time to try clearing it, before leaves appear again.

I don't plan to get rid of all the wild honeysuckle, because I like the summer scent, but there are cultivated forms which provide similar delights and are better behaved.

One of the showiest is Lonicera sempervivum or trumpet honeysuckle, whose large crimson flowers open to show a yellow throat. This vine doesn't offer the intense fragrance of common honeysuckle, but its long, tapering flowers are particularly attractive to hummingbirds.

Honeysuckle, whether wild or tame, is best appreciated by a door or window, or draped across an arched gateway, or twining on a trellis so its perfume can be appreciated.

You may want to intermingle it with clematis, climbing roses, jasmine or climbing hydrangea, as long as you remember it is strong enough to dominate.

You may want to beautify a utilitarian chain link fence by planting honeysuckle at the base and helping it to weave through the links to make a partial privacy screen. Or use it to disguise an old fence which has become an eyesore.

Our common Japanese honeysuckle, L. japonica, is a perennial vine, deciduous in our climate. Many other honeysuckles also are perennial.

It is fragrant day and night, but the scent is most powerful in the evening.

All honeysuckles prefer full sun but tolerate some shade. They grow in virtually any soil.

If it is left untamed and threatens to dominate or take over a shrub or other structure, don't fret. Prune it heavily—easier when leaves are gone—and next spring you will discover it has appeared again.

Sharon Daniels is a Virginia Cooperative Extension Master Gardener volunteer.