Winter honeysuckle

Appalachian-Blue Ridge forests

Arizona Mountains forests

Atlantic coastal pine barrens

Blue Mountains forests

Central Pacific Northwest coastal forests

Central Tallgrass prairie

Central-Southern Cascades Forests

What it needs

Conditions

Light

Full sun / Part shade

Water

Low water

Spacing

7 ft

Habit

Stiff-branched deciduous shrub, bushy and spreading, 6 to 10 feet tall and about as wide at Missouri Botanical Garden's figures, which Wikipedia puts as 3.3 to 9.8 feet with occasional plants to 15 feet. The mature form is best described as a bushy tangle of slender spreading branches rather than a shapely specimen, and old plants arch outward and layer where low branches meet the ground. Leaves are oval, dark green, sometimes with a bluish tinge, up to about 4 inches long and 2 inches wide, held on opposite pairs. In the southern part of its escaped range it holds much of that foliage very late and reads as semi-evergreen, though MBG classes it as deciduous at St Louis; either way it is in leaf before the native shrub layer around it and still in leaf after, and that extended season is the mechanism, not a description of the shrub's looks.

Care tips

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Do not plant it. Missouri Botanical Garden carries the Midwest noxious-weed notice on this species - listed as a noxious weed in one or more Midwestern states outside Missouri, and not to be moved or grown under conditions that would involve danger of dissemination. That is the governing instruction and it outranks every other line in this record.

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Identify it by the calendar and the nose before you identify it by leaf. Almost nothing else is in flower on bare wood in January with an intense lemon scent, and the flowers are small paired creamy white tubes about 0.4 inches long. Opposite oval dark green leaves, sometimes bluish-tinged, and small red berries in early summer confirm it.

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If it is already there, remove it before the berries ripen, not after. Cut the stems low in late winter and grub out or treat the crown, because a plant cut once regrows from the base. Then watch the ground for two or three years - the seed bank and the birds keep sending replacements - and hand-pull seedlings on damp ground while the roots are still shallow.

Lifecycle

Planting

Read this section as identification and removal guidance, not as a planting recommendation. Missouri Botanical Garden's culture line is one sentence long - easily grown in average, dry to medium, well-drained soil in full sun to part shade - and the brevity is the warning. It also lists tolerance of drought, dry soil, clay soil, erosion, deer and black walnut, and rates maintenance low. A shrub that asks for nothing, is unpalatable to deer, and is untroubled by juglone from a black walnut is a shrub with no natural brake on it in a woodland edge. Where the scent is genuinely wanted, plant wintersweet or Bodnant viburnum instead and site the plant near a door, since all three are worth more by the nose than by the eye.

Transplanting

Moves easily as container stock at almost any time in the dormant season, which is unhelpfully true of removals as well: a dug plant left on soil with roots attached will often re-root. If you are taking one out, take the crown out with it and do not leave prunings lying where low stems can layer. Do not pass plants or rooted layers over the fence to a neighbour; that is the single commonest way a listed noxious plant travels a mile.

Early growth

Fast and untroubled, with no need for supplemental water once rooted. Flowering starts within two or three seasons of planting. There is nothing to manage in the early years, which is precisely the problem: an unmanaged plant is a fruiting plant, and a fruiting plant is a seed source for every woodland edge a bird flies to.

Maturity

MBG records no serious insect or disease problems, with some susceptibility to leaf spot, blight and powdery mildew - cosmetic rather than limiting. Removal is the real maintenance task on a mature plant, and it is a two-part job. Cut the stems low in late winter, before the berries of the following season, and treat or grub out the crown, because a bare cut regrows from the base. Then keep watching the ground for two or three years: seedlings from the existing seed bank and from birds keep arriving after the parent has gone. Hand-pulling works well on young plants because the root system is shallow and fibrous, and it works best on damp ground.

Propagation

Do not. It is straightforward from seed after stratification, and from softwood and semi-hardwood cuttings and layered low branches, and none of that is a reason to make more of it. The propagation route that matters is the one nobody chooses: birds take the red berries in early summer and drop the seed along woodland edges, fence lines and perch trees, which is how a single garden shrub becomes a naturalised population across a county. Note also that this species hybridises with Lonicera standishii to give Lonicera x purpusii, widely sold for the same winter scent; it is a different plant with the same habits, and it should not be treated as the safe version of this one.

Pollination

Self-fertile (better with a partner)

The paired flowers are perfect and insect-pollinated, opening in a season when very little is flying, so fruit set in a garden is erratic and generally heavier where two or more plants stand within range of the same visitor. Do not read a light crop as containment. Fruiting is enough, often enough, to have put the species on the naturalised list in nineteen US states, and a bird moves a seed a great deal further than a bee moves pollen. The species also crosses with Lonicera standishii to give Lonicera x purpusii, sold widely for the same winter scent, which is worth knowing chiefly so that the hybrid is not mistaken for a sterile safe version of this plant.

Plants don't grow alone

Nectar forage

Bee

European honeybee (Apis mellifera)

A honey bee working an open short-tubed white flower on a mild January afternoon is the one genuinely appealing sight this plant offers, and in the southeast it does happen on warm winter days when almost nothing else is open. Marked plausible rather than documented because neither Missouri Botanical Garden nor Wikipedia records insect visitors on this species - MBG lists only birds under Attracts. It is also worth being clear that an out-of-season nectar flow for a managed non-native bee is not an ecological argument for keeping a listed noxious shrub.

Nectar forage

Bee

Common eastern bumblebee (Bombus impatiens)

Emerging bumblebee queens fly on mild days at the very start of the season and will work early flowers, and the short tube here is accessible to them. Marked plausible on floral form and timing rather than on a feeding record. Where an early bumblebee resource is actually the goal in eastern North America, the native answers are red maple, spicebush, willows and the spring ephemerals that this shrub shades out once it is established in a woodland edge.

Fruit forage

Bird

American robin (Turdus migratorius)

Missouri Botanical Garden lists the plant as attracting birds, and Wikipedia records the seed as animal-dispersed. Robins are among the thrushes that take exotic honeysuckle fruit in quantity. Read this relationship as a transport mechanism rather than a garden benefit: every berry eaten is a seed carried to a fence line or a woodland edge, and that is precisely how nineteen states of naturalised occurrence happened. There is a second cost documented for the group - American robins and wood thrushes nesting in exotic shrubs, chiefly Amur honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii) and common buckthorn, suffered higher nest predation than birds nesting in natives, because the low sturdy horizontal branch architecture gives predators easier access. That work is on the related shrubs rather than on this species, and it is named here as a group finding, not as a measured fact about winter honeysuckle.

Fruit forage

Bird

Cedar waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum)

Waxwings are flocking frugivores and strip fruiting shrubs, so an escaped colony in fruit is a route by which seed moves a long way in one afternoon. The most striking documented effect of exotic honeysuckle fruit belongs to this bird: waxwings that eat the berries of the introduced bush honeysuckles, chiefly Morrow honeysuckle (Lonicera morrowii), while growing tail feathers take up the pigment rhodoxanthin and grow an ORANGE tail band in place of the normal yellow one. Whether the fruit of this species does the same has not been established - it is recorded here as what the group does, and as the clearest illustration available that an exotic fruit crop is not nutritionally equivalent to the native one it replaced.

Shelter / habitat

Bird

Eastern songbirds (multi-species) (multiple species (Passeriformes))

The dense tangle of slender branches gives real structural cover, and this is the fairest thing that can be said for an escaped stand. It is also the trap in the argument. Structure is the easiest thing to replace and the least limiting resource in most eastern landscapes, while the fruit quality and the spring ground flora this shrub displaces are not easily replaced at all. A native thicket of spicebush, arrowwood viburnum or American beautyberry provides the same cover, better fruit and larval host value the honeysuckle has none of.

For people

Toxic - do not consume

Not a food plant. The small red berries are mildly toxic to people and cause vomiting and diarrhoea if eaten in quantity, and they sit at child height on a shrub that fruits in early summer when children are outdoors - the practical reason to keep it away from play areas even before the ecological reason. There is no edible use for the leaves, bark or flowers. The intense lemon fragrance is sometimes described as suggesting a culinary plant; it is not one, and the scent is not an indication of anything edible.

Native range

Climate notes

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Native to China - north-central, south-central and southeast - plus the Amur region of the Russian Far East. Missouri Botanical Garden gives the native range simply as China; the Kew rows add Amur, and the mapped range above follows Kew. Provenance is worth stating plainly: POWO returned HTTP 403 for all but one species in this batch, so these WGSRPD rows come from World Checklist of Vascular Plants data served through GBIF - the same Kew dataset - verified against the one species POWO did answer for, Cornus amomum.

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The Kew rows flag TWENTY-ONE INTRODUCED occurrences against those four native ones, and every introduced row is EXCLUDED from the native range mapped above. That exclusion is the single most important fact about this plant, so the excluded rows are named here rather than hidden: Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia in the United States, plus Bulgaria and Italy in Europe. Wikipedia describes the naturalised US range the same way - Ohio to New York and across the southeastern states, plus Utah. Nineteen states of escape against four native regions is not a plant with a range; it is a plant with a distribution problem.

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INVASIVE, and formally listed. Missouri Botanical Garden carries the Midwest noxious-weed notice on the species page: listed as a noxious weed in one or more Midwestern states outside Missouri, and not to be moved or grown under conditions that would involve danger of dissemination. Treat that as the governing instruction. Do not plant it, do not move it, and where it is already present remove it before the berries ripen in early summer.

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The mechanism is the same one that makes the whole exotic bush-honeysuckle group a problem in eastern North American woodland. It leafs out ahead of the native shrub layer and holds foliage later, extending its own growing season at both ends and shading the spring ground flora; it forms a dense understorey thicket; and it is spread by birds taking the red fruit. The fruit is where the ecological accounting turns negative. Exotic honeysuckle berries are carbohydrate-rich and low in lipid, which makes them poor migratory fuel next to the native fruit they displace - spicebush (Lindera benzoin), flowering dogwood and northern bayberry all carry far more fat. A hedgerow converted from natives to honeysuckle can hold the same number of berries and feed migrating birds much less well.

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Two of Missouri Botanical Garden's listed tolerances compound the problem rather than commending the plant. DEER is one: browsers work over the native shrubs and seedlings around it and leave this alone, which tilts an already uneven contest. BLACK WALNUT is the other: juglone suppresses a long list of garden and woodland plants and does not suppress this one, so a walnut grove edge that limits what else can grow there does not limit this. Drought, dry soil, clay and erosion tolerance complete the picture of a shrub with almost no site it cannot take.

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For winter fragrance without a noxious-weed listing, this catalog carries wintersweet (Chimonanthus praecox) and Bodnant viburnum (Viburnum x bodnantense), both of which open scented flowers on bare wood in mid-winter, and common witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana), a North American native that scents late autumn. For a honeysuckle in eastern North America there is one answer: the native trumpet honeysuckle, Lonicera sempervirens - a well-behaved hummingbird-pollinated vine rather than a thicket-forming shrub, and the substitute this record and both of its invasive siblings, Lonicera tatarica and Lonicera japonica, all point at.

Similar plants

Browse lateral options with similar roles, light needs, size, or native-range overlap; these are not filtered for a better climate fit.

Yucca filamentosa

Adam's needle

A virtually stemless, broadleaf-evergreen native of central and eastern North America: a basal rosette of rigid, sword-shaped, spine-tipped leaves up to 30 inches long, fringed along the margins with the curly white threads that give the species its name. In early summer a flowering stalk shoots from the center to 5 to 8 feet, carrying nodding, bell-shaped, creamy-white flowers. Tough enough for poor sandy soil, heat, drought, and salt spray, it earns its keep as architectural structure in dry and seaside gardens.

A fast, suckering native shrub of streambanks and moist thickets across eastern North America, grown for huge flat-topped cymes of tiny lemon-scented white flowers in early summer and the clusters of dark elderberry drupes that follow. Spreads by root suckers into naturalized colonies 5 to 12 feet tall and wide; the flowers feed butterflies and the showy fruit feeds birds. The raw berries are not eaten fresh - they are cooked into jelly, pie, and wine.

Full sun / Part sun / Part shade

A large, vigorous, fountain-shaped deciduous shrub that earns its common name in late spring, when its arching stems are smothered in masses of pale-pink, yellow-throated, bell-shaped flowers. Native to China, it is one of the great old-fashioned spring shrubs - spectacular in full bloom, much loved by bees, and offering peeling brown bark for quiet winter interest. It is also genuinely big: expect 6 to 10 feet tall and wide at maturity, so give it room rather than fighting its size with the shears. The form to seek out is the Award-winning "Pink Cloud", which carries a clearer, richer pink than the variable seed-grown species.

A drought-and-flood-tolerant native shrub of eastern North America with brilliant three-season interest - spring white-pink flowers, glossy black antioxidant-rich late-summer berries, and brilliant wine-red fall foliage - plus an extraordinarily wide cold-hardiness range (USDA 3a-8b). The berries are astringent fresh but the basis of a small but growing commercial industry (juices, wines, jams, supplements) for their exceptionally high anthocyanin content. Spreads by suckers; site where colony formation is welcome.

The familiar European blackberry, a vigorous arching thorny deciduous bramble that forms dense thickets and bears clusters of large sweet black aggregate berries in mid-to-late summer. Rubus fruticosus is not a single plant but a species AGGREGATE of many closely related microspecies, long cultivated for its fruit. HONEST CAUTION: while the berries are edible and excellent, the European blackberry aggregate is a load-bearing INVASIVE in many temperate regions. It and the closely related Himalayan blackberry (Rubus armeniacus) escape gardens into dense, impenetrable, thorny thickets that smother native vegetation, and are serious noxious weeds across the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. Where it is invasive, plant a regionally-appropriate native bramble (Plotwright carries the native Allegheny blackberry, Rubus allegheniensis) or a sterile/thornless cultivated cultivar instead.

Bodnant viburnum is a garden hybrid (Viburnum farreri × V. grandiflorum) bred circa 1935 at Bodnant Garden in Wales, with no wild native range. Its signature appeal is intensely fragrant, deep-pink flower clusters that open on bare stems from November through March - a unique winter-to-early-spring performance that few shrubs can match. The honest catch is timing: those early flowers are highly frost-tender and a single hard freeze after they open can destroy an entire season's bloom, leaving the plant ornamentally ordinary until autumn foliage color arrives.

Viburnum × bodnantense

Bodnant viburnum