Tell Me A Story: HONEYSUCKLE

Marcia Norwood
America's STORYTELLER
Telling Untold Stories in Photographs, Prose and Public Speaking

Click on each photograph

taken at the Norwood Gardens to enlarge.

Honeysuckle
(Lonicera)

Also known as Woodbine

These easy-care climbers come in a wide range of shades.

They bloom profusely, and their tube-shaped flowers bloom in clusters.

Honeysuckle are arching shrubs or twining vines (in the family Caprifoliaceae) native to the Northern Hemisphere.

There are about 180 species of honeysuckle, and 100 native species in China. Europe, India and North America have only about 20 native species each.

Light:Sun
Zones:4-9
Plant Type:Vine
Plant Height:Climbs to 25 feet
Plant Width:Climbs to 25 feet
Bloom Time:: Blooms summer and fall, depending on variety
Landscape Uses:Beds & Borders
Special Features:: Flowers,Attractive Foliage,Fragrant,Attracts Birds,Attracts Hummingbirds,Easy to Grow

Hummingbirds adore honeysuckle vine, and I do, too.

And stroke

with listless hand

The woodbine

through the window,

till at last

I came to do it

with a sort of love.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Aurora Leigh (1857), Book I

Norwood Gardens: Honeysuckle Vines. Copyright 2012 Marcia Norwood

Around in silent grandeur stood

The stately children of the wood;

Maple and elm and towering pine

Mantled in folds of dark woodbine.

Julia C. R. Door

At the Gate; Reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations

(1922), P. 372

I sat me down to watch upon a bank

With ivy canopies and interwove

With flaunting honeysuckle.

John Milton

Comus, (1637), Line 543

Norwood Gardens: Honeysuckle Vines. Copyright 2009 Marcia Norwood

I plucked a honeysuckle where

The hedge on high is quick with thorn,

and climbing for the prize, was torn,

and fouled my feet in quag-water;

and by the thorns and by the wind

the blossom that I took was thinn'd,

And yet I found it sweet and fair.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti,

(1828-1882) English Poet and Painter

The Honeysuckle

Reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations

(1922), P. 372

"And honeysuckle

loved to crawl

Up the low crag

and ruin'd wall."

Walter Scott

Marmion (1808), Canto III, Introduction

Copyright 2013 Marcia Norwood

And bid her steal into the pleached bower,

Where honeysuckles, ripen'd by the sun,

Forbid the sun to enter, like favorites,

Made proud by princes, that advance their pride

Against that power that bred it.

William Shakespeare

Much Ado About Nothing

(1598-99), Act III, Scene 1, Line 7