3 tips for growing Honeysuckle

Beautiful, elegant and fragrant, Honeysuckle vine is a popular choice for any garden. If you’re thinking of adding Honeysuckle to your yard, these 3 tips will help you make a choice you’ll be happy with for years to come.

Because of its sweet scent, honeysuckle is ideal for your terrace, porch or any outdoor living area where you can enjoy the fragrance. Likewise, it spreads easily over  tree stumps or a fence where its colourful flowers brighten the view up. Honeysuckle nectar attracts hummingbirds and butterflies bringing more life to your garden.

Owing to this sprawling quality of Honeysuckle, it’s ideal for growing on a mailbox or lamppost, or you can install a trellis to help it cover a wall.
This is where you need to be careful. Cultivars vary in size and vigour, so be sure to choose one that fits the space you want to fill.

The names of Honeysuckle types alone hint at a lush, beautiful vine. Some of the following will give you some ideas for your garden:
 
'Dropmore Scarlet' is a vigorous, long-flowering honeysuckle with bright red flowers, yellow inside, that grows to four metres tall .

Salmon-flowered 'Goldflame', is fragrant and willing to bloom intermittently from spring until late fall. It grows 3.5 metres long and is a top performer for porch pillars.

'Graham Thomas' is 9-metre-long yellow-flowered while ‘Serotina’ is a 4.5-metre-long red and white. Both are heavy-blooming and highly fragrant and will bloom repeatedly with proper care.

With a watchful eye, you can grow a thriving Honeysuckle vine. Follow these steps:

• Plant honeysuckle in spring; where winters are mild you can also set it out in the fall.
• Loosen the soil to a depth of 45 centimetres and work in an eight centimetre layer of organic matter, such as composted manure.
• Set plants at the same depth at which they grew in their containers and cut them back to 30 centimetres to encourage branching.
• Water as needed to keep the soil barely moist for the first growing season and mulch with a five centimetre layer of shredded bark, dried leaves or pine needles to help keep soil around the roots cool and moist.
• Fertilize established vines each spring with an all-purpose, controlled-release fertilizer according to label directions.
• To encourage reblooming, drench the roots in midsummer with a balanced-formula liquid fertilizer as directed on the label.
• Spring pruning of older shoots encourages later flowering.
• If earlier flowering is desired, wait to prune until after the plants bloom in late spring or early summer.
• With reblooming cultivars, prune plants lightly after any flush of flowers to help force out new growth.
• These vigorous vines are rarely if ever bothered by either pests or diseases.
• Many cultivars of honeysuckle perform best in partial shade, although they can handle more sun in cool-summer areas.

If you’re going for Honeysuckle for your garden, you’re spoiled for choice. The varieties of colours and lengths mean you’ll find exactly what you want for your garden and these tips will help you care for it successfully.