Lonicera maackii Seeds | Amur Honeysuckle
LATIN NAME: Lonicera maackii
COMMON NAME: Amur Honeysuckle
Plant Profile
Lonicera maackii opens fragrant white flowers in late spring that fade to yellow as they age, and it keeps fruiting into winter with red berries that birds carry far. In its home range it is a valued honey and hedgerow plant; planted abroad it has also escaped, which is worth knowing before you site it where winters stay mild and wet. Few shrubs open so many flowers at once, and a single mature plant can scent a whole corner of the garden on a warm evening, which is the first thing most visitors notice.
The shrub grows as a thicket of arching, pithy stems that are hollow between the nodes, a honeysuckle trait. Leaves are oval, opposite and dull green, and the small two-lipped flowers sit in pairs along the stem, later turning to glossy red or orange berries in clusters that hold on the bare winter branches. The hollow pith makes the cut stems float, a small trait children notice, and the opposite leaves give the stem a neat, paired look that separates it from the alternate-leaved shrubs nearby.
Maackii sits with the bush honeysuckles rather than the twining vining sorts, so it forms a free-standing shrub two to four metres tall. It is close to Lonicera tatarica and to the blue-berried L. caerulea, but the red fruit and the white-to-yellow flower mark it, as does the faint, sweet scent that carries on a warm evening.
Collected by the naturalist Richard Maack in the Amur basin, the plant reached European and North American gardens as a tough, flowering hedge. It tolerates heat, clay and city smoke better than many rivals, which is why it was planted so widely before its seeding habit drew concern from land managers.
Science & Biotechnology
The wood and bark of Amur honeysuckle contain the pterocarpan maackiain, an isoflavonoid also found in related legumes and studied for its antifungal and insect-feeding effects. Leaf extracts are screened for the same defensive chemistry that helps the shrub resist pests and that gives it the clean foliage gardeners notice through summer.
The flower nectar draws bees and yields a light honey, and the scent volatiles are sampled to compare maackii with the Japanese honeysuckle used in herbal tea. Breeders select for heavier flowering and cleaner yellow fade, since a shrub that holds its colour reads better in a mixed hedge than one that browns early.
Because seedlings vary, choice forms are struck from softwood cuttings or raised by micropropagation to hold a selected flower colour and habit, then lined out in the field. This also lets a grower multiply a non-fruiting selection where the wild type is treated as a weed.
Uses & Benefits
Planted a metre apart, maackii makes a flowering privacy hedge that bees visit and that holds its leaves late. In cold regions it is a reliable alternative to less hardy evergreens, and the arching habit gives a softer line than a clipped box or yew wall. It also tolerates city pollution better than many natives, which is why it shows up in municipal plantings along busy roads where cleaner-leaved shrubs brown at the edges.
The flowers are grazed by bees for a mild honey, and the red berries feed thrushes and robins through winter. Note the berry crop is also why the plant spreads where winters are mild, so clip spent flowers if you want to keep it in bounds and off the bird-dispersed list.
On farms it serves as a living fence and a windbreak, and its thicket gives cover for small birds. Keep it cut to a height you can manage, since an untrimmed maackii will reach for the light and open up at the base, leaving a leggy, less useful screen.
Growing from Seed
Crush the ripe berries, clean the seed from the pulp and give it a cold moist rest in damp sand. Sow in a sandy loam at about its own depth and keep the bed evenly moist through the cold spell, because a drying seed coat will harden and delay the seedling by a full season.
Move seedlings to tubes at eight to ten centimetres, then set them out when the stem reaches thirty centimetres. Space hedge plants sixty to ninety centimetres for a quick join, wider for specimens, and plant the crown at soil level so the hollow stems do not sit buried and rot.
Shear after flowering to keep shape and cut old stems to the ground now and then to renew. Water the first season; once set it copes with drought. Where the plant is invasive, choose a non-fruiting cultivar or clip spent flowers, and never dump berry-laden prunings in the wild.
Our Take
Maackii is a bee plant first and a hedge second. For close kin, compare Lonicera japonica, the berry-blue Lonicera caerulea, and the winter Lonicera fragrantissima. The European Lonicera xylosteum rounds out the bush honeysuckles.
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