Lonicera caerulea Seeds | Blue Honeysuckle
LATIN NAME: Lonicera caerulea
COMMON NAME: Blue Honeysuckle, Haskap, Sweetberry Honeysuckle
Plant Profile
The plant is a compact, much-branched shrub, rarely more than two metres, with opposite oval leaves that emerge after the flowers. The blooms sit in pairs on short stalks in the leaf axils, pale yellow and funnel-shaped with two lips, and the two ovaries behind each pair fuse so that the berries stay joined at the base. The open blossom stands up to hard spring frost, commonly rated to about minus seven degrees Celsius, while the dormant wood of a mature bush shrugs off far lower temperatures than that.
Because the flowering window arrives before honeybee colonies are working in numbers, bumblebees carry most of the pollen, and they will fly in weather that keeps other bees in the nest. The plants are self-incompatible, so a lone bush flowers freely and sets little fruit; two different cultivars planted within a few metres of each other is the standard arrangement. The species itself circles the boreal belt, from Scandinavia through Siberia to Kamchatka, Sakhalin and Hokkaido and on across Alaska and northern Canada, and the garden selections descend from the eastern end of that range, where the Russian and Japanese forms carry the largest and sweetest berries.
The skin and the pulp hold a dense load of anthocyanin, with cyanidin-3-glucoside as the principal pigment and cyanidin-3-rutinoside alongside it. Chlorogenic acid appears in quantity as well, and vitamin C is present, though it falls as the fruit sits after picking. The berries carry a soft waxy bloom over the blue-black surface, which rubs off on handling and marks the fruit as untouched.
Science & Biotechnology
Anthocyanins are easily degraded by heat and by a shift in acidity, so commercial processors press the fruit cool and often freeze-dry the juice. The berry carries very little pectin of its own, which means jams need an added gelling agent, and the astringency of the tannins drops sharply in the last stage of ripening, so the pick is made when the berries part from the bush with almost no pull.
Uses & Benefits
Work in Russia, Japan and Canada gave the garden its named forms. Canadian releases such as Aurora, Tundra, Borealis and Indigo Gem were selected for a firm skin and a sweet-tart balance, Polish selections such as Wojtek for heavy crops on a compact bush, and Hokkaido material for size. Because seedling plants vary in flavour, yield and bloom time, commercial growers plant vegetatively raised stock rather than open-sown seed.
Fresh fruit tastes somewhere between blueberry and raspberry, with a faint bitterness in the skin. Eat it by the handful, spoon it over yoghurt or cream to soften the acid, press it for juice, or turn the pulp into sauce for game and duck. It also ferments well; the deep colour carries through to wine and mead, and the berries freeze without losing shape.
Clipped lightly, blue honeysuckle makes a tidy fruiting hedge along a vegetable plot, and the earliest blossom feeds bumblebee queens at the start of the season. Deer and birds both take an interest in the crop, so a net is worth the trouble as the fruit colours.
Growing from Seed
Give it deep, moist, free-draining ground with a pH near neutral, in full sun with cool roots; a mulch of compost or bark keeps the surface moist and weeds down. Space bushes a metre and a half apart. Fruit forms best on young wood, so after harvest cut the oldest stems out at ground level and leave the newer shoots to carry the following crop. Water steadily while the fruit swells, and do not let the bushes dry out at ripening.
Squeeze the ripe berries, wash the seed clean, and sow it into trays of loam-based compost topped with grit. The seed needs cold and moisture before it will stir, so trays are left in a cold frame or a refrigerator through the winter and brought into gentle warmth in spring. Keep the surface damp, prick out the seedlings once four or five true leaves have opened, and expect the plants to differ from each other. Named cultivars come from cuttings taken in summer and rooted in a shaded frame.
Our Take
If your garden has a late-frost problem, this is the fruit shrub that ignores it. Plant two cultivars, mulch heavily, and pick early in the morning while the fruit is cool, because the skins bruise once the morning warms. The wider honeysuckle family is worth exploring: the winter honeysuckle brings scent into the depths of winter, while the highbush blueberry and the elder are soft-fruit neighbours that ask for the same acid, moist ground.
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