Honeysuckle horror story
We have a very common invasive alien in Eureka Springs for which we can use animal analogies of varmint and vermin. The shrub occurs at the edges of our yards, rights-of-way and along roadsides. Some of our common green space in Eureka Springs is dominated by its weedy presence. Known locally as “bush honeysuckle,” it has small whitish flowers in pairs at the leaf axils (the leaves opposite), then produces small globular red to black translucent fruits, which birds relish and then disperse the seeds.
Also known as Amur honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii), count it among our most noxious woody weeds. It hails from Asia, is native to much of western China, eastward to Korea, and the Russian Far East. In Japan it’s an endangered native plant.
Here in North America it is an invasive alien, introduced into horticulture in the 1880s and promoted by the Soil Conservation Service for erosion control, soil stabilization and wildlife food from the 1960s to mid-1980s. Whoops, not such as good idea.
In some urban areas such as Cincinnati, St. Louis and Washington, D.C., it dominates interstate roadsides creating a monoculture where nothing else grows. It displaces important riparian plant habitat causing declines in goldenseal, ginseng, black cohosh and other important native plants. It not only competes with native plants for habitat, but provides rodents cover, increasing their populations. It is browsed by deer, increasing their food supply and numbers, then swelling numbers of ticks hosted by deer, in turn increasing the incidence of human disease for which ticks are vectors.
Hints of its possible usefulness are found on scholarly Chinese websites, which only include journal article titles in English. The flowers bloom before invasive Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica), extracts of which are a cold and flu remedy found in every pharmacy in China. It appears that the flowers of Amur and Japanese honeysuckle have similar chemistry, hence Amur honeysuckle may be used as a substitute. Under the name phan-ma´i-bru it is used in 1.8 percent of traditional Tibetan medicine prescriptions, but for what, I know not.
How does it spread? Birds eat the translucent fruits, dispersing the seeds. This is not a problem in China. When the Maoists came to power 70 years ago, one of their first acts of public welfare was to use a chemical arsenal to eliminate the three scourges – flies, rats, and birds. Birders take note. Human activity has a cultural perspective. More on its removal in a future column.