When we think of the honeysuckle, we have mixed feelings. Invasive? Bee-filled danger. Sweet nectarous blooms. Scent of the newly hot nights of May.
![Honeysuckle](http://tryonfarm.org/share/files/images/Honeysuckle%20Lonicera%20spp.jpg)
For Philip Freneau, called “That Rascal” and “The Poet of the American Revolution,” The Wild Honeysuckle may have been the beginning of American Transcendentalism:
Fair flower, that dost so comely grow,
Hid in this silent, dull retreat,
Untouched thy homed blossoms blow,
Unseen thy little branches greet:
No roving foot shall crush thee here,
No busy hand provoke a tear.By Nature’s self in white arrayed,
She bade thee shun the vulgar eye,
And planted here the guardian shade,
And sent soft waters murmuring by;
Thus quietly thy summer goes,
Thy days declining to repose.Smit with those charms, that must decay,
I grieve to see your future doom;
They died—nor were those flowers more gay,
The flowers that did in Eden bloom;
Unpitying frosts, and Autumn’s power,
Shall leave no vestige of this flower.From morning suns and evening dews
At first thy little being came;
If nothing once, you nothing lose,
For when you die you are the same;
The space between is but an hour,
The frail duration of a flower.
In Bluegrass, Honeysuckle can be a Rose or a band name.
For birders, Honeysuckle is a way to attract hummingbirds.
Children reading “The Fairy Night Caps” in 1861 learned:
Of course the elderly gentlemen fairies lounged among the honeysuckles, and talked politics, and quarrelled dreadfully about who should be the next President; for they took an immense interest in the affairs of us mortals; and the elderly lady fairies just as much, of course, pulled the characters of their best friends to pieces, without so much as a single regret; while the lovely young Queen, with half-a-dozen of her favorites, after dancing once, to set the fashion, ordered her pages to shake down a perfect shower of wild-rose leaves, on the edge of the hollow, of which they made soft and freshly perfumed couches; and there they listened to the exquisite music, and watched the dancers, and gaily devised plans for the comfort of our dear little friend, Lame Charley.