Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
Heaven scent
Fabulously fragrant flowers, a magnet for wildlife, easy to grow... honeysuckle might well be the perfect plant, says Monty Don
One of my favourite joys of this midsummer season is the range of scents, and my favourite of all is honeysuckle. Its fragrance saturates these sunken Herefordshire lanes, the warm pools of air soaking up the scent like blotting paper till you can almost see it. Yet it never becomes overpowering or crude in the way jasmine or even lilies can. Honeysuckle is fruity, warm and gently erotic.
The botanical reason for this strength of smell is to attract the moths that pollinate it – hence its increased power at night. They can apparently detect it up to a quarter of a mile away. Our noses may not be that acute but the lovely scent of honeysuckle is enough to draw anyone into their garden on a summer’s evening, and the lovely flowers earn their keep well enough in the brightness of the midday sun. A perfect plant – right around the clock.
The wild honeysuckle, Lonicera periclymenum, or woodbine, works best if it is in some shade – needing warmth rather than direct sunlight to bring out the best of its scent – and a west-facing urban wall is ideal. The main thing to avoid is letting it dry out too much.
Honeysuckle is wonderfully good for wildlife. Bees take over pollinating duties from moths during the day, and then later the flowers bear round, red fruits that are important food for songbirds, while the tangle of stems makes excellent cover for nests. The leaves, meanwhile, are eaten by butterfly larvae.
Most honeysuckles flower on the previous year’s wood so should be pruned – if necessary – immediately after flowering. Japanese honeysuckle, Lonicera japonica, however, flowers on the same year’s growth, so should be pruned each spring. Mine is in almost permanent rather dry shade so the chances of it flowering are slim, as the combination of too much shade with too little water will always inhibit flowering, but the plant survives this mistreatment with a degree of robustness.
Nearly all honeysuckles will grow in shade, but if the flowers can have sunshine for half the day they’ll be more floriferous and the fragrance will be noticeably stronger. To keep a honeysuckle in tiptop condition you must provide the roots with rich soil and plenty of shade and the flowers with some sunshine, preferably in the evening.
We have Lonicera periclymenum ‘Belgica’, or early Dutch honeysuckle, with its raspberry ripple flowers and good fragrance, by the main door leading to the garden. The late Dutch honeysuckle, L. periclymenum ‘Serotina’, flowers with a deeper purple splash to replace the early version’s pink, and smells fine too, but later.
I am planning to plant L. caprifolium, sometimes sold as Italian honeysuckle. It is deciduous, copes well with shade and has fabulous scent.
L. japonica ‘Halliana’ is another I want to add to this garden; it is deciduous but hangs onto its leaves through all but the coldest winters and flowers right through midsummer. It needs sun to perform best, though, and we’re limited in wall space. However, I rather fancy twining it up an apple tree in the orchard.
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