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Tatarian honeysuckle

T. Kebert / Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0

Tatarian honeysuckle

Lonicera tatarica

Tatarian honeysuckle is not a plant to choose. It is a plant to identify and remove, and the reason so many of them are still standing is that in May they smell wonderful. Native to southern Russia and central Asia, it was brought to North America as an ornamental in 1752 and has escaped about as completely as a shrub can: Kew's checklist rows carry SIXTY-TWO introduced occurrences against thirteen native ones, the widest ratio of any plant authored for this catalog so far, running from Alaska, Alberta and Saskatchewan down to Texas, California and New Mexico, east to Nova Scotia, and back across Europe from Great Britain and Spain to Poland, Romania and Ukraine. Missouri Botanical Garden's own PlantFinder page for the species carries the flag "Midwest Noxious Weed: Do Not Plant". Minnesota lists it Restricted, which makes propagating or selling it illegal there. Wisconsin lists it Restricted under NR 40. Vermont's noxious weed quarantine makes it illegal to transport, buy or plant shrub honeysuckles at all. The mechanism is worth understanding rather than taking on faith, because it is what makes this shrub different from an ordinary weedy plant. It leafs out one to two weeks before the native shrubs around it and holds its leaves later into autumn, so the ground beneath is shaded through exactly the spring window that trillium, spring beauty, toothwort and the tree seedlings need, and it goes on shading it after the natives have finished. It then produces an enormous crop of red bird-dispersed berries that are rich in sugar and poor in fat, which is the wrong ratio for a bird trying to lay down fuel for migration; the same fruit deposits enough of the pigment rhodoxanthin that cedar waxwings moulting on a honeysuckle diet grow orange tail bands instead of yellow ones. And it has a field mark that settles identification in one cut: on older stems the pith between the nodes is HOLLOW, and the bark is shaggy and pale and peeling. Every native bush honeysuckle and every native Diervilla has solid white pith. Cut a stem, look at the end, and you will know within a second what you are dealing with. If what you actually wanted was a honeysuckle, the answer in eastern North America is Lonicera sempervirens, the native trumpet honeysuckle - a well-behaved hummingbird-pollinated vine rather than a thicket-forming shrub. This record exists so that you can name this plant, cut it correctly, and replace it.

Climate fit: moderate (47/100)

Structure

Light

Full sun / Part shade

Water

Moderate water

Mature size

8-12 ft tall · 10 ft apart

Hardy in zones

3a-8b

brutally cold to frosty winters

Native in Illinois

Related products

Cold hardiness

These values are location-based: this location's current hardiness is the baseline, and the 2050 value is a projected future climate for this same location.

Now

Zone 6b

Plotwright

USDA Zone 6b

-5°F to 0°F

Well-suited

2050

2100

Zone 7a

Plotwright

0°F to 5°F

Well-suited

In plain terms: This location has cold winters. Its winters are projected to keep warming through 2050.

✓

Well-suited today and still thriving in 2050.

Heat tolerance

Heat tolerance values are location-based too: heat days today are observed at this site, and the 2050 value projects this same location under a future climate.

Loading AHS heat-zone data for this location...

Where this plant fits

Suitable across 42 ecoregions - 34 climate-resilient through 2070 · 5 suited today · 3 newly possible by 2070. Best matches first.

Appalachian mixed mesophytic forests

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Appalachian-Blue Ridge forests

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Arizona Mountains forests

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Atlantic coastal pine barrens

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Blue Mountains forests

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Central Pacific Northwest coastal forests

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Central Tallgrass prairie

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Central-Southern Cascades Forests

What it needs

Conditions

Light

Full sun / Part shade

Water

Moderate water

Spacing

10 ft

Habit

Vigorous, densely branched, rounded, multi-stemmed deciduous shrub, 8 to 12 feet tall and about as wide, with the branches arching outward at the top so a mature plant is a broad dome rather than an upright. Missouri Botanical Garden notes that taller specimens become visually ungainly, which is a polite way of saying the shrub outgrows the place it was planted. The leaves are ovate to ovate-lanceolate, up to 3 inches long, bluish green above and noticeably paler beneath, with no autumn colour at all. The identification features are on the stems rather than the leaves: older branches carry shaggy, pale grey, peeling bark and are HOLLOW between the nodes, which separates this and the other exotic bush honeysuckles from every native Lonicera and Diervilla, all of which have solid white pith. In a hedgerow or a woodland edge the shrubs coalesce into a dense continuous understorey layer that is genuinely difficult to walk through, and once that layer closes there is very little growing underneath it.

Care tips

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Confirm it with one cut before you spend a weekend on it. Slice through an older stem and look at the pith: HOLLOW between the nodes, with shaggy pale peeling bark outside, means an exotic bush honeysuckle. Solid white pith means a native Lonicera or Diervilla and you should stop. The flowers are in pairs in the leaf axils, the leaves are bluish green and pale beneath with no autumn colour, and the fruit is paired and red.

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Survey in early spring, not in summer. For one to two weeks this shrub is the only green thing in an otherwise bare understorey, and every seedling in a wood is visible from a distance. That single window turns an impossible search into an easy one, and it is also the visual proof of the harm - the ground it is shading is the ground the trilliums were about to use.

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Pull seedlings, treat stumps, and never just cut. A first-year seedling lifts out of moist ground whole. Anything with a woody base resprouts vigorously from a bare cut, so cut it and paint the stump promptly with glyphosate, or use a basal bark application of triclopyr ester, both per the Wisconsin DNR; a weed wrench works on mid-sized stems where you would rather not use herbicide. Prescribed spring burning is the site-scale tool where fire is available.

Lifecycle

Planting

Do not plant it. That is not a stylistic caveat attached to a garden recommendation, it is the instruction: Missouri Botanical Garden's page for the species carries "Midwest Noxious Weed: Do Not Plant", Minnesota classes it Restricted so propagation and sale are prohibited there, Wisconsin lists it Restricted under NR 40, and Vermont's noxious weed quarantine makes it illegal to transport, buy or plant shrub honeysuckles. The reason it turns up anyway is that it was planted deliberately for a century and a half - as hedging, as a screen, as a bird garden shrub, and by soil conservation programmes - and those plants are still seeding. What the horticultural profile describes is simply why it succeeded: average to organically rich loam, medium water, full sun to part shade, low maintenance, hardy from zone 3 to 8, and tolerant of deer, drought and black walnut. There is almost nowhere in the northern half of the continent it will not grow.

Transplanting

There is no legitimate reason to move one. If a plant has to come out of the ground, it comes out to be destroyed, not relocated, and the root crown and any fruit go with it. Do not compost the berries; seed passes through a garden heap intact and a heap is often sited exactly where a new thicket is least welcome.

Early growth

Seedlings are the whole game. Bird-dropped seed germinates readily in shade, at woodland edges, under fence lines and beneath perch trees, and a first-year seedling pulls out of moist ground whole. By the fourth or fifth year the plant is flowering and its own seed is in circulation. Walk the same ground in early spring, when this shrub is the only green thing in the understorey and every seedling is visible from thirty feet - that one habit turns a difficult search into an easy one, and it is the single most useful thing to know about controlling it.

Maturity

Established shrubs have very little wrong with them, which is the problem. Missouri Botanical Garden lists the honeysuckle witches'-broom aphid (Hyadaphis tataricae, the Russian aphid), which distorts shoot tips into dense brooms and disfigures the plant without killing it, plus leaf spot, powdery mildew and blights. None of these controls the species. Removal does. Cut stems resprout vigorously, so cutting alone converts one shrub into a multi-stemmed one; the standard treatments are a cut stump painted promptly with glyphosate or a basal bark application of triclopyr ester, both recommended by the Wisconsin DNR, with prescribed spring burning used at site scale where fire is available. Whatever the method, plan on returning for several years: the seed bank and the surrounding bird population will both keep resupplying the site, and a cleared gap that is not replanted simply refills with the same shrub.

Propagation

Do not propagate it, and in Minnesota do not: propagation and sale are prohibited under its Restricted listing. The species roots readily from cuttings and seeds freely, and it also crosses with Lonicera morrowii to produce the hybrid Lonicera x bella, which is at least as aggressive as either parent and is a large fraction of what people are actually looking at when they think they have identified Tatarian honeysuckle. That hybrid is one more reason to treat the whole exotic bush honeysuckle group as a single removal target rather than trying to key it out to the species before acting.

Pollination

Self-fertile (better with a partner)

The fragrant paired flowers are insect-pollinated - bumblebees and other long-tongued bees, with hummingbirds and hummingbird moths at the tubular pink corollas - and fruit set is heavy, including on isolated shrubs in hedgerows, which is the practically important point: one plant on its own can seed a neighbourhood. Stated honestly, none of the sources reviewed here gives an explicit breeding-system determination for this species, so the classification is the softest reading consistent with the observed behaviour rather than a documented result. What IS documented is that it crosses freely with Lonicera morrowii to give the hybrid Lonicera x bella, which is fertile, at least as aggressive as either parent, and extremely common - so a great deal of what is confidently called Tatarian honeysuckle in the field is actually that hybrid.

Plants don't grow alone

Larval host

Moth

Hummingbird clearwing moth (Hemaris thysbe)

Hemaris larvae feed on Lonicera among a short list of hosts that also includes viburnum, hawthorn and snowberry, so an exotic bush honeysuckle can genuinely rear a native sphinx moth. Marked plausible because the host records are at genus level for Lonicera rather than specific to this species. This is the strongest honest counterpoint to the rest of the record, and it does not change the conclusion - a naturalised thicket that hosts one generalist moth while suppressing an entire spring ephemeral layer is still a net loss, and the removal-plus-replant sequence keeps the moth host in the planting if a native Lonicera goes back in.

Nectar forage

Bird

Ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris)

Paired tubular pink corollas about an inch long are a shape hummingbirds work, and ruby-throated hummingbirds are widely reported at bush honeysuckle across the invaded range in eastern North America. Marked plausible rather than documented because the reports are observational and general rather than a published feeding study on this species. If the reason you are keeping the shrub is the hummingbirds, the substitution is direct and it is strictly an upgrade: Lonicera sempervirens is a genuine hummingbird-pollinated native with a longer season, red-orange trumpet flowers, and none of the ecological cost.

Nectar forage

Bee

Common eastern bumblebee (Bombus impatiens)

Long-tongued bumblebees are the most frequently reported visitors at the May bloom, and the common eastern bumblebee is the species most likely to be doing that work across the invaded northeast and midwest. Marked plausible because the visitation records for this shrub are genus-level and observational. Worth noting that the bloom is a single burst in May, so the resource is brief - a native shrub layer supplying nectar across a longer season is the better trade even measured purely on bee food.

Nectar forage

Bee

European honeybee (Apis mellifera)

Missouri Botanical Garden records the flowers as showy and fragrant, and honey bees work bush honeysuckle bloom where it is abundant. Marked plausible rather than documented: no source reviewed here quantifies the nectar yield for this species, and abundance in a hedgerow is not the same as a documented forage value.

Fruit forage

Bird

Cedar waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum)

Waxwings eat this fruit heavily, and the consequence is visible on the bird. Exotic bush honeysuckle berries, Tatarian honeysuckle among them, contain the red carotenoid rhodoxanthin; a waxwing that grows its tail feathers on a honeysuckle diet deposits it alongside the normal yellow pigment and ends up with an ORANGE tail band instead of a yellow one. Orange-tipped waxwings were essentially unknown before the mid-twentieth century and have appeared in step with the spread of these shrubs. It is the clearest single illustration of the point the whole record turns on: the birds eat it enthusiastically, and enthusiasm is not the same as benefit.

Fruit forage

Bird

American robin (Turdus migratorius)

Robins take the berries in quantity and are among the main dispersers, which is why infestations follow perch trees, fence lines and woodland edges rather than radiating evenly from a parent shrub. Robins also nest in these shrubs, and that is where the honest complication sits: Schmidt and Whelan's 1999 work in Conservation Biology found robin nests in exotic Lonicera and Rhamnus suffered HIGHER predation than nests in comparable native shrubs, because the nests sit lower, the exotic shrubs have no thorns, and the branch architecture makes it easy for a predator to move through. That study was on Lonicera maackii, a congener, not on this species - the mechanism plainly applies, but the published result does not name Tatarian honeysuckle, and the distinction is worth keeping.

Shelter / habitat

Bird

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

Dense bush honeysuckle gives structurally attractive nesting and roosting cover, and birds use it readily - which is exactly what makes it an ecological trap rather than simply a poor shrub. The cover is chosen, the fruit is eaten, and both perform worse than the native alternative: the fruit is high in sugar and water and low in lipid, so a bird laying down fuel for migration gets calories in the wrong currency, and the nest sites carry the elevated predation risk documented in the congener work. Missouri Botanical Garden's own suggested use for the species includes 'bird garden', which is precisely the well-meant recommendation this record exists to correct.

For people

Toxic - do not consume

Not edible. The berries cause diarrhoea, vomiting and abdominal pain if eaten, and they are abundant, glossy and red at child height on a shrub that is often growing in a hedge or along a path, which is a worse combination than the toxicity alone suggests. There is one genuinely odd and well-attested aside worth knowing: about a third of domestic cats that do not respond to catnip do respond to Tatarian honeysuckle wood, and sawn-off offcuts of the stems are sold as cat toys. That is not a reason to keep a shrub - a cut stem from a removal serves the same purpose - and it does nothing to change the advice, which is to take the plant out.

Native range

Worldwide native range.

Climate notes

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Native to central Asia and southern Russia - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Xinjiang, Mongolia, Manchuria, West Siberia, Altay, Krasnoyarsk, the North Caucasus, Transcaucasus and central, east and south European Russia. Provenance is worth stating honestly rather than implying a first-hand Kew read: POWO returned HTTP 403 for every species in this batch except Cornus amomum, so the mapped range comes from World Checklist of Vascular Plants rows served through GBIF - the same Kew dataset, reached by a different route - verified against that one control.

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The Kew rows also flag SIXTY-TWO INTRODUCED occurrences, and they are excluded from the native range mapped above. For this plant that exclusion is the single most important fact in the record, because sixty-two against thirteen is the widest introduced-to-native ratio of anything authored for this catalog so far. In North America: Alaska, Alberta, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Manitoba, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Brunswick, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Nova Scotia, Ohio, Ontario, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Quebec, Rhode Island, Saskatchewan, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming. In Europe and beyond: Austria, the Baltic States, Buryatiya, Czechia-Slovakia, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Irkutsk, Krym, the Netherlands, Poland, Primorye, Romania, Spain, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. Introduced to North America as an ornamental in 1752.

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The regulatory position is not uniform, and it is worth checking your own jurisdiction rather than assuming. Minnesota Department of Agriculture lists it Restricted: propagation and sale are prohibited, transport is allowed only under Minnesota Statute 18.82, and removal is encouraged but not legally required. Wisconsin DNR lists it Restricted under NR 40. Vermont places shrub honeysuckles on its noxious weed quarantine, making it illegal to transport, buy or plant them. Missouri Botanical Garden appends "Midwest Noxious Weed: Do Not Plant" to its own species page. Beyond those, the species appears on state invasive or noxious lists across the northeast, mid-Atlantic and midwest.

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The harm mechanism is phenological first and chemical second, and the order matters because the first part is beyond argument and the second is not. The leaves emerge one to two weeks earlier than native shrubs and drop later, which shades the forest floor across the exact spring window when native ephemerals and tree seedlings do their year of growth; the Wisconsin DNR and the Minnesota Department of Agriculture both record that timing difference explicitly. Dense stands also deplete soil moisture and nutrients and reduce tree seedling density. Allelopathy - the release of compounds that chemically suppress neighbours - is additionally claimed for this species, and it is stated more cautiously by the agency sources ("may release chemicals") than by popular accounts. The light and moisture effects alone are sufficient to explain what is observed.

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There is no Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center record for this species and no per-state NATIVE distribution to report, because it is not native anywhere in North America - the resolver found no Wildflower Center match, which is the correct answer rather than a gap. The USDA PLANTS profile (symbol LOTA) was resolved and verified separately against the USDA PLANTS service and lists the species as introduced. Where a honeysuckle is wanted in eastern North America, the substitute is Lonicera sempervirens, the native trumpet honeysuckle: a vine rather than a thicket-forming shrub, hummingbird-pollinated, native across more than thirty states, and well behaved. Its sibling in this group, Lonicera fragrantissima, is the same problem in winter-flowering form, and Lonicera japonica is the same problem as a vine.

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Hardy from zone 3 to 8 in average to organically rich loam of medium moisture with good drainage, in full sun to part shade, and tolerant of drought, deer and black walnut. Read that list as an explanation of the invasion rather than as a planting recommendation: there is very little ground in the northern half of the continent that excludes it, and the deer tolerance in particular compounds the problem, because browsers in an invaded wood eat the native regeneration around it and leave the honeysuckle standing.