A Sweet Scent

If you’re a June baby one of your birth flowers like the other, the rose, by any other name would also smell as sweet: honeysuckle. It is likely that you will be most familiar with the type of honeysuckle that often decks a pergola, climbing honeysuckle. Climbing honeysuckle is fantastically easy to look after once established, all you need to do is mulch once a year in the spring, and water your climbing honeysuckle thoroughly when the weather is very hot and dry. The lengthy flowering period of this kind of honeysuckle is another plus as they usually flower from mid-summer to autumn. The frosts of winter also need not be a worry because climbing honeysuckle is typically hardy.

A particularly beautiful variety of climbing honeysuckle is Lonicera estrusca ‘Donald Waterer’ with its massive clusters of leaves and blooms. It does prefer a slightly warmer climate so you may have more success with it if you don’t live in a colder part of the country.

Adding a shrubby honeysuckle to your garden can help with keeping your garden looking great year-round as several of them flower in the winter. However, if you would like a summer flowering variety, Lonicera syringantha is a type of shrubby honeysuckle that flowers in the spring and summer. Other than the differences in the flowering period of the majority of shrubby honeysuckles, caring for them requires you to take pretty much the same steps that caring for climbing honeysuckle requires.

Something to note is that the fruit of the honeysuckle can be toxic to both humans and pets, so please take this into account when handling the plant. But there is a variety that produces fruit that is safe to eat, Lonicera caerulea. This edible honeysuckle produces flavoursome fruits that look like elongated blueberries and are delicious raw or in a compote.