On a warm May evening in Middle Georgia, you often smell honeysuckle before you see it. The scent drifts off fencerows, ditch banks and the edges of the woods, sweet and a little spicy, strongest just as the light starts to fade. For many Southerners it carries a whole childhood with it: bare feet, screen doors and the trick of drawing a single drop of nectar from the base of a blossom.
Two honeysuckles, one name
The honeysuckle most of us smell along Georgia roadsides is Japanese honeysuckle, Lonicera japonica. Its flowers open white and fade to yellow, so a single vine often carries both colors at once. It was brought to North America from East Asia in the early 1800s as an ornamental, and it liked its new home a little too well. Today it is considered invasive across much of the Southeast because it climbs over and smothers native plants.
Georgia also has a native honeysuckle, the coral or trumpet honeysuckle, Lonicera sempervirens. Its slender tubular flowers are red to coral on the outside and yellow within, and they have little scent. What they do have is hummingbirds, which visit the blooms through spring and summer. If you want to plant a honeysuckle, this is the one most native-plant gardeners recommend, and your county office of the University of Georgia Cooperative Extension can help with local advice.
A botanist, a nickname and an old English word
The genus name Lonicera honors Adam Lonicer, a sixteenth-century German botanist and physician. The common name is more straightforward: it comes from the old habit of sucking the sweet nectar from the flowers. In England the native honeysuckle has long gone by another name, woodbine, and it appears in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where woodbine canopies the bank where the fairy queen sleeps.
In the Victorian language of flowers, honeysuckle was often associated with devotion and the bonds of affection, a fitting meaning for a vine that holds on so tightly to whatever it climbs.
Why the scent is strongest at dusk
Many people notice that honeysuckle smells strongest in the evening. That timing is no accident. Moths are among the flowers’ pollinators, and the long, narrow blossoms and evening fragrance suit night-flying visitors well. Step outside after supper and you are smelling the plant at its most generous.
That same scent is surprisingly hard to capture. True honeysuckle extracts are rare, and most honeysuckle candles, lotions and perfumes are recreations built by perfumers from other materials. They can be lovely, but the real thing is only available outdoors, for a few weeks, on the vine.
Enjoying honeysuckle gently
- Take an unhurried dusk walk along a fence line or woodland edge and let the scent find you.
- Show a child the nectar trick: pinch off the green base of a fresh flower, draw the thread-like style slowly through and taste the single bright drop.
- Cut a few sprigs for a small jar on the porch table, where the fragrance will carry into the evening.
- Leave the berries alone. The berries of many honeysuckles are not considered edible, so teach children to enjoy the flowers and skip the fruit.
If you are sensitive to pollen or strong floral scents, enjoy honeysuckle from a little distance, and talk to your doctor about any reactions that concern you. For everyone else, it is one of late spring’s free gifts: a reason to slow down, stand still at the edge of the yard and breathe in the end of the day.