Botanical name: Lonicera periclymenum 
Folk names: Woodbine, eglantine

Type: Deciduous climbing shrub

Wildlife: Pollen for long-tonged bees like garden bumblebees and nectar for moths. Food plant for 39 types of caterpillar, including the early grey moth, and broad-bordered bee hawk-moth whose larvae leaves little circular holes in the leaves. Round, red berries in autumn eaten by birds including blackbirds and blackcaps. The tangle of stems create a sheltering habitat for birds including wrens, dunnocks and sparrows. (Blackbirds created a nest in the gap between the fence and trellis, right next to my greenhouse!)

Flowers: July to September

Decorative merit: Large, tubular flowers starting with a crimson base blending to a honeyed-yellow with protruding stamens, on twining green stems which will become woody over time. Flowers have a heady fragrance, best enjoyed in the evening.

Where: Sun or part-shade. Middle of borders, wilder corners or try in spring containers.  

Folklore: William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream: ‘Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine’, ‘So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle gently entwine.’

Family relative of devilsbit scabious, field scabious and teasel.

Seeds to Exeter Seed Bank