Chase away the winter blues with our winter garden lecture series.

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You may have heard people bad-mouthing honeysuckle and wondered to yourself why anyone would get worked up by a flowering shrub. On the one hand, honeysuckle is a low maintenance, reliable plant that produces sweetly-scented flowers that many people adore. In the fall, it produces large quantities of red berries enjoyed by our local birds and wildlife, and it is even semi-evergreen in mild winters. It makes a decent privacy screen along fence lines, the deer don’t really hurt it, and it tends to show up in our yards for free. What’s not to love?

Well, quite a lot, actually. Amur honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii) is the species most commonly seen in our area. It is native to Asia and was brought to Cincinnati intentionally in an effort to control the erosion on our steep hills. It was planted for a couple decades before anyone really understood two key things about it: 1) It isn’t very good at erosion control because most of its roots stay near the surface, and 2) It is HIGHLY invasive in this climate. Like, more invasive than anything anyone had ever seen.

All those red berries that are devoured by birds? Well, they are digested and then seeded (with fertilizer) all over the tristate by those same birds. It is so successful here that this one species has fundamentally and majorly changed the forests in our region, full stop. This is not an exaggeration.

Why? How can one species do that? A few ways. First, it’s really good at shading out everything else, including tree seedlings and anything on the ground layer, like native perennials. That’s important because the forest that will be here in one or two hundred years needs to start now as seedlings, and they have a really hard time doing that under honeysuckle. It’s also known that honeysuckle roots produce compounds that slow the growth of everything else around it, which gives it an edge to become the dominant species. And finally, it’s a real space hog. With wide-spreading, arching branches, it quickly fills the understory with nothing but itself, and there’s not much room left for our native shrubs to carve out a living. It is not an overstatement to say that if honeysuckle is allowed to remain in a woodland, species will be pushed out. Local extinctions can occur, and are occurring.

I spend a lot of time hiking and studying the native plants in the area, and beyond. At first it all looked the same to me, but over time I realized our forested areas in Cincinnati are fundamentally different and less diverse than what I was seeing in almost every other region I travelled to. And the more I looked and paid attention, it became painfully obvious that honeysuckle is the cause. Our local ecology is diminished by it, and now that I can see it, I want to do something about it.

I’m proud that at Wimberg we promote honeysuckle removal and have even done quite a bit of volunteer work to clear honeysuckle from Ault Park, in particular. Peter Wimberg himself has donated hundreds (or perhaps thousands?) of hours to personally cut honeysuckle from those woods, because he understands its impact and wants to protect a unique and valuable habitat. That says something to me.

It is possible to imagine a future without honeysuckle in our local natural and protected spaces, but it will require an enormous investment of time and effort, as well as ongoing maintenance to stay on top of the new seedlings the birds bring in. And where are those seeds coming from? Quite likely from our yards and back fence lines. To cut down on seed dispersal, we need this to be common knowledge–everyone needs to understand why it’s important to remove honeysuckle from our properties to prevent it from spreading back into our protected wild spaces.

Often people are reluctant to remove it if it’s a privacy barrier, but there are good replacement options and it is worth looking into them. If you want to remove honeysuckle from your property, let us help you come up with a plan to make that happen. And if you have a wooded area on your property, it is almost certainly full of honeysuckle. You will be amazed at what kinds of biodiversity can return to a woodland after the honeysuckle is gone. Beyond that, it will be a much more open and inviting space that you can actually explore, if you want, or simply enjoy from a distance, with the knowledge that you’re doing what you can for our local ecosystem.

Now is the ideal time of year to remove honeysuckle, and we’d be happy to get you on our schedule before the busy spring season begins.

Sarah Geiger-Behm

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