Honeysuckle Meaning: 1869’s “Bonds of Love,” China’s “Gold and Silver,” and the Native Vine to Plant
Honeysuckle means “bonds of love” in an 1869 flower dictionary and “gold and silver” in China. See the tradition, and the native vine to plant instead.
In short
- Honeysuckle meaning: “bonds of love” in Tyas’s 1869 flower dictionary and “generous and devoted affection” in an 1884 edition.
- A twelfth-century lay likens two lovers to honeysuckle and hazel.
- In the eastern US, plant native coral honeysuckle; Japanese honeysuckle is invasive.
- Checked against: Tyas (1869), the 1884 Language of Flowers, NC State Extension, UConn Extension.
Honeysuckle means “bonds of love” in Robert Tyas’s 1869 Language of Flowers and “generous and devoted affection” in an 1884 New York edition. The tradition leans on an older image, a vine that winds itself around whatever it climbs. Marie de France used that image in a twelfth-century lay about Tristan, Shakespeare used it in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Chinese medicine calls the dried flowers of Lonicera japonica jin yin hua, the “gold and silver” flower. Modern lists also give honeysuckle to June as a second birth flower beside the rose. In the eastern United States, the honeysuckle to plant is native coral honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens), because NC State Extension classes Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica) as highly invasive; elsewhere, check your state’s native plant list. For the wider system of flower meanings, see our flower symbolism guide.
Honeysuckle meaning by tradition
The table sets each tradition beside the kind of source behind it. Only the Victorian dictionaries and the modern birth-flower list state a meaning in one line; the other rows show an idea through a story, a verse, a plant name or a belief.
| Tradition | What it says | Source and its kind |
|---|---|---|
| Victorian: Tyas, 1869 | “Bonds of Love”: the ties of child to parent and native place, warnings about harmful bonds, and, on Plate VII, a worthy suitor’s attachment | Robert Tyas, The Language of Flowers, Routledge, 1869. A dated flower dictionary |
| Victorian: New York edition, 1884 | Honeysuckle: “Generous and devoted affection.” Coral honeysuckle: “The colour of my fate.” French honeysuckle: “Rustic beauty” | The Language of Flowers, including Floral Poetry, Worthington, 1884. A dated flower dictionary |
| Medieval romance | Lovers who cannot live apart: “nor you without me, nor I without you” | Marie de France, Lay of the Honeysuckle, in Eugene Mason’s 1911 translation. A literary text, placed in the second half of the 12th century by Gaston Paris, as Mason reports |
| Shakespeare | An embrace: “So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle gently entwist.” In Much Ado, a shady bower | A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.1 and Much Ado About Nothing, 3.1. Play texts: an image, not a stated meaning |
| Irish and British folk belief | Toughness (an Irish saying), luck and protection at the door, fidelity, dreams of love; some places call it unlucky indoors | The Woodland Trust, Plant-Lore and a West Cork People column. Folklore recorded in modern times; the accounts conflict |
| Chinese medicine | A name, not a love symbol: jin yin hua, the “gold and silver” flower, named for the plant’s twining form and its different flower colours | Shang et al. (2011). A peer-reviewed review of a traditional medicine |
| Modern birth-flower lists | June’s second birth flower: affection, happiness and the sweetness of new love | The Farmers’ Almanac. A modern list; the honeysuckle entries in the two Victorian books do not mention June |
In short, the Victorian meaning is devotion, the medieval and Shakespearean image is the embrace, and the Chinese name is about the plant’s form and flower colours, not love. The folklore row is the one that contradicts itself, because some accounts say a wedding follows when honeysuckle enters the house and others call it unlucky indoors.
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Victorian honeysuckle meaning: “bonds of love” and “generous and devoted affection”
The Victorian books do not agree on one phrase. Tyas’s 1869 chapter is headed “Bonds of Love,” and he prints the plant’s botanical name as Caprifolium Periclymenum. The epithet periclymenum is the one the Woodland Trust gives for Britain’s native honeysuckle, Lonicera periclymenum.
Tyas starts with memory, not courtship. He writes that the Bonds of Love “are, perhaps, the last to be broken which bind the child to the parent, especially to the mother,” and he ties the chapter to the affection people keep for the place where their early years were spent.
He then warns that there are “Bonds of Love, so called, which produce injurious effects to the young maiden,” quoting Mrs. Laurence’s verse to Cupid. For young men, he says, such bonds “often work most disastrously,” and he cites Cowper. The bonds he approves are those that “have their origin in esteem for the highest form of mental endowments and moral worth.”
Plate VII of the same book groups honeysuckle with white heath, scarlet ipomoea and sweet sultan as the message of a worthy suitor: “May good luck attend my attachment, and secure our mutual happiness in the bonds of love.”
The 1884 New York edition is plainer. Its vocabulary gives honeysuckle “Generous and devoted affection,” coral honeysuckle “The colour of my fate” and French honeysuckle “Rustic beauty,” and Kate Greenaway’s Language of Flowers lists the same three entries in its Project Gutenberg text, which prints no year. The 1884 chapter calls the flower “homelike and English,” says it “clasps the porch and thatch of the poor man’s cottage” and “wafts soothing perfume to the lover,” and reprints the Countess of Blessington’s poem that opens “See the Honeysuckle twine / Round this casement.”
Neither book says why honeysuckle received these meanings. The Smithsonian Gardens lesson plan says the guidebook authors used “visual and verbal analogies, religious and literary sources, folkloric connections, and botanical attributes” to derive their associations. A vine that twines is an obvious analogy for a bond, but that link is our inference, not a reason either book gives. “Coral honeysuckle” is also the common name of the North American vine Lonicera sempervirens, according to NC State Extension, although the books do not say which species they mean.
Twining as a bond: honeysuckle and hazel in a twelfth-century lay
The oldest text we found that ties honeysuckle to bound lovers is Marie de France’s Lay of the Honeysuckle. Eugene Mason’s 1911 introduction says her poems reveal no single fact or date to go on, though critical opinion presumes she was born at Pitre near Rouen. Citing the scholar Gaston Paris, he places her in the second half of the twelfth century.
In Mason’s translation, King Mark has banished Tristan, who returns to Cornwall and hides in a forest. He cuts a hazel wand, peels it, carves his name on it and leaves it on the road the Queen will ride. The message on the wand compares the pair to the two plants: “So sweetly laced and taken were they in one close embrace, that thus they might remain whilst life endured. But should rough hands part so fond a clasping, the hazel would wither at the root, and the honeysuckle must fail. Fair friend, thus is the case with us, nor you without me, nor I without you.” In Mason’s translation the song is called “Goatleaf” in English and “Chèvrefeuille” in French.
Shakespeare uses a similar picture. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania, doting on the sleeping Bottom, says: “Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms. … So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle / Gently entwist.” In Much Ado About Nothing, Hero has Margaret send Beatrice to hide in a bower “where honeysuckles, ripen’d by the sun, / Forbid the sun to enter.” There the honeysuckle is a shady hiding place, not a stated symbol.
The image has a basis in how the plant grows. The Woodland Trust says honeysuckle “twines itself around branches, making them become twisted,” and that walking sticks were made from branches the vine had twisted. NC State Extension describes coral honeysuckle as a twining vine that needs a support structure. The West Cork People column reports an Irish saying, “chomh righin leis an táith-fhéithleann,” “as tough as the honeysuckle,” and says the wood binds other wood tightly in its grip.
So the twining image runs two ways in these sources: an embrace that cannot be parted in Marie de France and Shakespeare, and a grip that does not let go in the Irish saying. Tyas adds a warning that some bonds of love do harm.
Jin yin hua: the “gold and silver” flower in Chinese medicine
In China, jin yin hua is the name of the dried flowers or flower buds of Lonicera japonica, and NC State Extension lists “Gold-and-silver Honeysuckle” among the plant’s English common names. Shang and colleagues write that the drug was named Jin Yin Hua and Ren Dong “due to the outline form of sprawling and twining lianas, and the different flower colors.”
Both colours appear on one plant. The review describes the corolla as “white, turning yellowish or tinged pink,” and it divides flowering into stages that include “the silver flowering stage and the gold flowering stage.” NC State says the flowers are white and age to buff or yellow.
The review reports that the Ben Cao Gang Mu, a classical Chinese materia medica, recorded the plant as a remedy for swellings and dysentery, among other uses, and that it is listed in the Pharmacopoeia of the People’s Republic of China. The review lists traditional uses against “exopathogenic wind-heat, epidemic febrile diseases, sores, carbuncles and some infectious diseases.”
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→ View My Garden CalendarThis is a medicine name and a record of traditional use, not a recommendation. We found no source in this research that gives jin yin hua a love meaning. The Woodland Trust says the berries of common honeysuckle are poisonous, and NC State says Japanese honeysuckle “has medium severity poison characteristics.”
Honeysuckle folklore: luck at the door, dreams indoors and the June birth flower
Folk belief gives honeysuckle both lucky and unlucky roles, depending on the place. The Woodland Trust says it was once believed that honeysuckle growing around a home’s entrance would bring good luck and stop evil spirits entering. It adds that honeysuckle has long been considered a symbol of fidelity, and that in Victorian times young girls were banned from bringing it into the house because its strong smell was believed to give them suggestive dreams.
Collected reports go the other way. Plant-Lore records a Shropshire farming contact who said honeysuckle is “never taken indoors” (2004), a Dorset account that it “brought sickness in with it” (1983), and a Swansea report: “Unlucky to bring honeysuckle flowers into the house” (1983). The West Cork People column says that in England bringing it into a house meant a wedding would follow, and that flowers in a girl’s bedroom brought dreams of love. Treat all of these as tradition, not fact.
The same column reports that honeysuckle was used in Ireland in a drink against the effects of the evil eye, and that in parts of Scotland farmers put pieces of honeysuckle and rowan over cow-house doors on May Day. Popular pages also claim a Celtic or Druidic meaning for honeysuckle. The Irish material we found is folklore recorded in modern times, and we found no early Irish text that gives the plant a stated meaning.
In modern lists, honeysuckle is June’s second birth flower. The Farmers’ Almanac calls the rose the “official June birth flower” and honeysuckle the “recognised alternate,” and says honeysuckle “can mean affection, happiness, and the sweetness of new love.” The honeysuckle entries in Tyas and the 1884 edition do not mention June, so the pairing is a modern convention. For both June flowers, see our June birth flowers guide.
Native coral honeysuckle or invasive Japanese honeysuckle? A US guide
In the eastern United States, plant native coral honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens) and not Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica). UConn Extension’s factsheet calls Japanese honeysuckle “an aggressive invasive woody vine that climbs, suffocates, and strangles other plants” and coral honeysuckle “an excellent native alternative.”
UConn Extension says Japanese honeysuckle was first introduced to the United States on Long Island, New York, in 1806 for its perceived ornamental, erosion control and wildlife value. NC State Extension says it is native to Japan, Korea, Manchuria and China and that NC State’s weed specialist classes it as highly invasive.
The comparison below draws on NC State Extension’s Plant Toolbox pages for coral and Japanese honeysuckle, the UConn Extension factsheet, the University of Michigan’s CLIMBERS database and the Missouri Department of Conservation’s field guide.
| Feature | Native coral honeysuckle (L. sempervirens) | Japanese honeysuckle (L. japonica) |
|---|---|---|
| Flower | Deep red outside, rarely orange to yellow, and always yellow inside (Michigan); 1½ to 2 in long (Missouri) | White, fading to yellow (UConn); buff or yellow with age (NC State) |
| Scent | Non-fragrant (NC State) | Fragrant (UConn); “very fragrant” (NC State) |
| Range | Native to the eastern US (NC State), Connecticut to Florida (Michigan) | Native to East Asia (NC State); introduced to Long Island in 1806 (UConn) |
| Leaves | Top pair below the flowers fused into one disk (Missouri, Michigan); white underneath (Michigan) | Paired leaves not fused at the stem (UConn) |
| Berries | Red (Missouri); orange-red to red (Michigan) | Dark purple to black (UConn) |
| Size and habit | Twining, 10 to 20 ft, needs a support (NC State) | Vines can reach 80 to 120 ft; runners that root at the nodes can grow more than 10 ft a year (UConn) |
| Garden advice | Pollinated by hummingbirds; prune after flowering (NC State); “an excellent native alternative” (UConn) | “Highly invasive”; “Remove Japanese honeysuckle where possible” (NC State) |
The quickest field check is the leaves just below the flowers. A fused disk rules out Japanese honeysuckle and points to coral honeysuckle or another native vining honeysuckle; the Missouri Department of Conservation names limber, yellow and grape honeysuckles as similar. UConn says Japanese honeysuckle is told from its native look-alikes by dark fruit and the absence of fused leaf pairs.
Coral honeysuckle is native to the eastern United States, and the Missouri Department of Conservation lists it as native to states southeast of Missouri and naturalized in Missouri. Outside the East, check your state’s native plant list before you plant.
The climbing that reads as devotion in a verse is what UConn describes as strangling in the invasive vine. It says Japanese honeysuckle kills plants by girdling, smothering, or causing them to collapse under their weight. In Marie de France’s lay the hazel and the honeysuckle fail together, whereas UConn describes a vine that kills the plants it climbs.
From meaning to planting: choosing a honeysuckle you can live with
If you want honeysuckle for what it means, the species you plant decides whether the vine behaves like the one in the lay. Our how to plant honeysuckle guide covers native versus invasive species, site selection and timing. Our honeysuckle species guide compares vines and shrubs, including four non-invasive species, and our coral honeysuckle guide covers the native vine from this article.
NC State says coral honeysuckle needs a support structure and advises avoiding pruning until after flowering. For other flowers that carry a devoted-love meaning, see our flowers that mean love page.
Frequently asked questions
What does honeysuckle mean in the language of flowers?
Devoted affection in the 1884 New York edition, which gives “Generous and devoted affection,” and “Bonds of Love” in Tyas’s 1869 Language of Flowers, a phrase he uses for several kinds of attachment.
Why does honeysuckle symbolize a bond?
The sources show the image, not a stated reason. Marie de France compares two lovers to honeysuckle and hazel in one close embrace, and Shakespeare writes that the woodbine “gently entwist” the honeysuckle. Tyas does not say why honeysuckle carries that title.
Is honeysuckle the June birth flower?
Modern lists give June two birth flowers. The Farmers’ Almanac calls the rose the “official June birth flower” and honeysuckle the “recognised alternate.”
What does jin yin hua mean?
Jin yin hua is the Chinese medicine name for the dried flowers or flower buds of Lonicera japonica, and NC State lists “Gold-and-silver Honeysuckle” as an English common name. Shang and colleagues tie the name to the plant’s sprawling, twining form and its different flower colours.
Is it bad luck to bring honeysuckle indoors?
Traditions disagree. Plant-Lore records reports from Shropshire (never taken indoors), Dorset (brought sickness) and Swansea (unlucky), while a West Cork People column says that in England a wedding would follow. These are folk beliefs, not facts.
Which honeysuckle should I plant in the US?
In the eastern US, native coral honeysuckle, Lonicera sempervirens. UConn Extension calls it an excellent native alternative to Japanese honeysuckle, which NC State classes as highly invasive; elsewhere, check your state’s native plant list.
Sources
- Tyas, Robert. The Language of Flowers; or, Floral Emblems of Thoughts, Feelings, and Sentiments. George Routledge and Sons, 1869. Internet Archive full text (linked in text)
- The Language of Flowers, including Floral Poetry. R. Worthington, New York, 1884. Internet Archive full text (linked in text)
- Greenaway, Kate. Language of Flowers. George Routledge and Sons. Project Gutenberg eBook 31591 (linked in text)
- Marie de France. The Lay of the Honeysuckle, in Mason, Eugene (trans.), French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France, 1911. Project Gutenberg eBook 11417 (linked in text)
- Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 4 Scene 1. MIT Complete Works of Shakespeare (linked in text)
- Shakespeare, William. Much Ado About Nothing, Act 3 Scene 1. MIT Complete Works of Shakespeare (linked in text)
- Smithsonian Gardens. The Language of Flowers, historic bloom lesson plan (linked in text)
- Shang, X. et al. Lonicera japonica Thunb.: Ethnopharmacology, phytochemistry and pharmacology of an important traditional Chinese medicine. Journal of Ethnopharmacology 138(1):1–21, 2011 (linked in text)
- NC State Extension. Lonicera japonica (Japanese honeysuckle). NC State Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox (linked in text)
- NC State Extension. Lonicera sempervirens (coral honeysuckle). NC State Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox (linked in text)
- Wallace, V., Siegel-Miles, A. and Sowizral, K. Invasive Plant Factsheet: Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica). UConn Extension and Connecticut Invasive Plant Working Group, updated June 2024 (linked in text)
- University of Michigan. Lonicera sempervirens. CLIMBERS database (linked in text)
- Missouri Department of Conservation. Trumpet Honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens). Field Guide (linked in text)
- Woodland Trust. Honeysuckle (Lonicera periclymenum) (linked in text)
- Plant-Lore. Honeysuckle. Collected folklore of plants (linked in text)
- Daly, Eugene. Honeysuckle in folklore. West Cork People, July 2026 (linked in text)
- Mayntz, Melissa. June Flower Lore: Rose and Honeysuckle Meanings. Farmers’ Almanac, updated 19 August 2026 (linked in text)
