I’VE probably grown more species of honeysuckle than of any other genus except, perhaps, roses and primulas. I love them—but not all of them. An evergreen ground cover plant called Lonicera pileata doesn’t interest me at all.
The same is true of L. nitida, also evergreen, but most often used for hedging; it needs no fewer than three cuts a year to keep it tidy. There’s a manky cultivar called Baggeson’s Gold that’s even uglier, but that’s only two duds among some 180 species that all make excellent garden plants.
There’s a big division between the honeysuckles that twine and climb and usually open their long flowers to exhale a delicious scent and the ones that have smaller flowers on fast-growing superhardy bushes. I got very excited about 20 years ago when the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), announced that it had managed to cross the two types of honeysuckle. Henceforth, we could look forward to hybrids that carried long, sweet scented flowers on tough, neat shrubs. Alas, they never appeared.
INRA has, however, produced some very good forms of our native honeysuckle, Lonicera periclymenum, of which the most impressive is called Chic&Choc. Its flowers are chocolate-coloured on the outside, a striking contrast with the creamy-yellow insides.
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