Yellow Honeysuckle

Size, growth and what to expect

Yellow honeysuckle grows at a medium pace, about a foot and a half a year in our growth estimator. It is a twining vine of 10 to 20 feet on a support, and a plant fills 3 to 6 feet. Without a support it trails along the ground or grows into a loose shrub.

Whorls of tubular flowers about an inch long open in April and May above a pair of leaves joined into a disk, and hummingbirds and butterflies visit them. Round orange-red berries a quarter inch across ripen in August and September, and birds and small mammals eat them. Its leaves feed the caterpillars of the bumblebee clearwing moth.

It grows wild in scattered stands from Illinois and Kentucky south to Georgia and South Carolina and west to Kansas and Oklahoma, most often in the Ozarks. Its home is rocky woods and their openings, bluff ledges and rocky stream banks. Illinois lists it as endangered and Tennessee as threatened, and it is gone from Ohio.

How to grow Yellow Honeysuckle

Yellow honeysuckle grows in full sun or part shade and flowers best in full sun. It takes most soils, rocky ones too, but it does best in a humus-rich soil that drains well. Once rooted it takes some drought. It needs a trellis or a fence, and a little help to start twining up it, or it trails along the ground and turns shrubby. Set the support 3 feet from a wall, and set plants 3 feet apart for a screen. At its size it can go within 15 feet of overhead wires.

Saplings ship bare-root or potted. Plant them dormant, from leaf fall until bud swell, in a hole wider than the roots and no deeper. Set the crown at the soil line, put the native soil back in, and keep the mulch clear of the stems. Tie the first shoots to the support. Sow cleaned seed outdoors in fall, a quarter inch deep, under a little straw. For a spring sowing, chill it damp in the refrigerator for two to three months first.

Water weekly through the first summer if rain is short, and mulch the roots for winter. It flowers on last year's wood, so prune right after it blooms.

A lone yellow honeysuckle does not set berries with its own pollen, so plant two or more from different parents for fruit. Hummingbirds and other visitors with long tongues reach its nectar. No serious pest or disease troubles it. Birds eat the berries, but as with other honeysuckle vines, treat them as toxic to people.