Honeysuckle
This is the season of evening scent. In the garden now, the perfume of honeysuckle pervades the air at dusk. Its fragrance is difficult to describe, an element of spice – of nutmeg perhaps or cloves - and a sweetness that makes you want to bury your nose into its crimson and cream flowers, over and over again.
Honeysuckle has fragrance day and night, but exudes its scent most powerfully during the evening. Since it’s a native plant it’s particularly a ractive to indigenous insects.
Most nocturnally scented plants have wonderfully sweet perfume and their long corolla tubes can only be pollinated by something with a long proboscis. Almost all are pollinated by moths. Honeysuckle is a perfect example of this process. In common with most night-scented flowers, they further a ract night-flying moths by their pale colour, much more easily detected in the dark.
One of the enormous benefits of honeysuckle is that it will thrive in both sun or shade. ‘Woodbine’, as Shakespeare called it in
Midsummer Night’s Dream, is essentially a plant of the woodland edge but flowers best with its head in the sun. The same plant that graces our gardens today provided the shady arbour for Titania and her fairies.
We have a rambling plant of Lonicera periclymenum ‘Graham Thomas’, named after the great plantsman. It’s unusual in having no trace of crimson in its flowers. It mixes beautifully with soft yellow climbing roses, such as its namesake, rose ‘Graham Thomas’.