Honeysuckle (Lonicera Japonica)

This beautiful flower is from a Honeysuckle vine, lonicera japonica, or Japanese Honeysuckle. Although there are several species of native honeysuckle that grow throughout North America, this is the honeysuckle most people are familiar with. It has a heady aroma and flashy appearance that attract attention.

Although it was innocently introduced in the 1800s as a garden ornamental, this plant has made its way onto the USDA's invasive weed list, maligned for its habit of smothering and wreaking havoc on native plant habitat. Birds love the little blue-black berries that appear on the vines in the fall, and are generally the main carriers of the seeds, spreading them out over large areas.

Surprisingly, this beautiful nuisance has a hidden artistic talent. How about some honeysuckle paper and ink? Patterson Clark, who writes the Washington Post column Urban Jungle,  is a visual artist who searches out invasive plants around DC. He takes the plants back to his studio, where he processes them into paper and ink to use in his artwork. American Craft Magazine wrote an interesting article on what he does, and his website is here at Alienweeds. According to Clark, the leaves of honeysuckle make a greenish black ink, and the inner bark of the stems makes a golden yellow paper. 

But honeysuckle doesn't stop there. It's a useful member of the traditional herbal community as well! According to Traditional Chinese Herbalism, Vol 2, by Michael and Leslie Tierra, the young stems of honeysuckle are useful for supporting joint health in cases of arthritis and rheumatism, while the flowers are used across a broad spectrum of Heat* disorders.

Plus, most herbalists here in the south could easily pick a basketful of the flowers to make their own extract, and do native plants a favor in the process. Honeysuckle could also be used as a substitute for traditional Heat clearing herbs such as goldenseal and echinacea, which both face over-harvesting pressure and should be carefully obtained through companies with sustainable harvest practices when used.  

*Herbalists use the term Heat to describe the human body being out of balance in a way that might be expressed as fever, inflammation, soreness, redness, pain, swelling, or abcesses.