Sweet Honeysuckles for the Native Garden
creating a Hummingbird Heaven or making Honeysuckle wine
Did you suck sweet nectar from the spurs of honeysuckle flowers when you were a child? I certainly did! And so did the hummingbirds, our premier North & South American feathered pollinators. There are many honeysuckles for the pollinator garden, but knowing which ones are native is important, because some are foreign invaders.
The best species for people in eastern North America is the Trumpet Honeysuckle, Lonicera sempervirens, shown above. The variety ‘Major Wheeler’ grows in my Toronto Canada garden quite nicely, and blooms several times per summer. The reds or oranges of the trumpets attract hummingbirds. If you can also grow the native Trumpet Vine you’ll have two summer sources of nectar for Ruby Throats. There are many named varieties of Trumpet Honeysuckle which do well in the US Southeast - see this article by Glynis Ward about her Atlanta garden.
The Twining or Limber Honeysuckle has beautiful spring flowers followed by red berries. It’s found from Canada down to midwestern states and is fully hardy. There are dark red to pale orange forms available. But is there ever confusion - some sources call this a vine, others a shrub. Some say it prefers shade, others say best blooms are in full sun. Check with local native plant people to discover where they find it.
Another very hardy honeysuckle is found all over the northern hemisphere and is grown for its delicious blue fruit, known as Haskap in fruit markets. Lonicera caerulea is called Blue Honeysuckle, Sweetberry Honeysuckle, or Honeyberry.
The University of Saskatchewan has been breeding Haskaps for farmers for years and has full information on how to grow it. Cross-pollination between two varieties is recommended for best yield. Queen bumblebees are the most effective pollinators, as Sandra Danae Frier found in her M.Sc. at the University of Regina. Amusingly, one commercial website posted her photo below but misidentified the pollinator as bumblebees. Can you tell what they are?
Many spring and fall bee-flies mimic various kinds of bees or wasps to deter predators. Below is a real bumblebee on Haskap flowers:
Compare the two photos. The flies have bare abdomens and very stubby antennae, while the bumblebee has a colorfully hairy abdomen and much longer antennae.
Some people make a wine from Haskap fruit in places where wine grapes dont grow, such as the mountains of British Columbia, Moose Jaw Saskatchewan, or Beaverlodge Alberta. I’d love to be able to serve my pollinator gardening friends honeysuckle wine!
In the northland but also along the west coast down to California and Mexico is Lonicera inovlucrata, with common names twinberry honeysuckle, bearberry, and many more. It generally needs moist soils.
The Lewis and Clark expedition found the Orange honeysuckle Lonicera ciliosa, a large shrub native to the western forests.
Once we go into the Rocky Mountains or into the US southwest, a whole new set of native honeysuckles occur, but mostly growing at medium elevations, not down low. The Arizona honeysuckle, the Chapparal honeysuckle, and the Utah honeysuckle are a few of the species. Then as you go south into Central America many species of hummingbirds feed on many, many species of red or orange tubular flowers. Many of them are called honeysuckles but there seem to be few species south of Mexico.
I’d like to close this incomplete list of native North American honeysuckles with a closely related genus in the honeysuckle family. The “Bush honeysuckles” in the genus Diervilla are nice low shrubs for partly shaded places. In my back yard the Northern Bush honeysuckle Diervilla lonicera grows under trees in the same place where bloodroot blooms in earliest spring. The yellow flowers are late May to June in Toronto. This bush suckers but pruning after flowering keeps it under control easily.
Breeders have been at work creating bush honeysuckles with colorful foliage - I planted ‘Kodiak Black’ under the redbud tree in my front yard. Only later did I find out that this series has been bred from the Appalachian bush honeysuckle species Lonicera rivularis. Those in the southern might want to try the southern bush honeysuckle, Diervilla sessifolia.
But whatever you do, don’t plant the Japanese Honeysuckle, Lonicera japonica. It is invasive in North America. It has become a real pest! Make sure the honeysuckle you’re planting is native to your area.
Cheers - hoist a glass of honeysuckle wine!
Clement Kent
p.s. I started this Substack before the pandemic and then got quite distracted. I plan to post more regularly henceforth.
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Note that I try to ensure all images are open source. However, many of them are protected by copyleft restrictions such as the Creative Commons licenses. If a picture caption has a link to a person, there’s a CC license for use of that picture.