Lonicera caprifoliumL.

Italian HoneysuckleItalian WoodbineItalian woodbinePerfoliate Honeysuckle

WFO wfo-0000359853 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Lonicera caprifolium, photographed by Petr Harant
fig. a Petr Harant, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-13 / obs. 197778304

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 14 botanical countries

Regions where Lonicera caprifolium is native: North Caucasus, Transcaucasus, Türkiye, Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Czechia-Slovakia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, NW. Balkan Pen., Romania, Türkiye-in-Europe North CaucasusTranscaucasusTürkiyeAlbaniaAustriaBulgariaCzechia-SlovakiaGermanyGreeceHungaryItalyNW. Balkan Pen.RomaniaTürkiye-in-Europe
Native distribution of Lonicera caprifolium, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Albania ALB EUROPE
Austria AUT
Bulgaria BUL
Czechia-Slovakia CZE
Germany GER
Greece GRC
Hungary HUN
Italy ITA
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Romania ROM
Türkiye-in-Europe TUE
North Caucasus NCS ASIA-TEMPERATE
Transcaucasus TCS
Türkiye TUR

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 200 in flower of 311 examined

Proportion of examined Lonicera caprifolium in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 0 too few examined
Feb 0 0 too few examined
Mar 0 5 0% 0% to 43%
Apr 59 95 62% 52% to 71%
May 113 142 80% 72% to 85%
Jun 26 47 55% 41% to 69%
Jul 0 17 0% 0% to 18%
Aug 1 4 too few examined
Sep 0 0 too few examined
Oct 0 0 too few examined
Nov 0 0 too few examined
Dec 1 1 too few examined

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Lonicera caprifolium observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 200 of 311 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 7 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 2,010 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -10.9 °C -3.9 °C 1.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 20.9 °C 24.4 °C 29.0 °C
Annual rainfall 561 mm 741 mm 1,567 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 88 mm 123 mm 272 mm

It is found where winters bring hard frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 2,010 research-grade observations of Lonicera caprifolium that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 14 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Caprifolium atropurpureum hort. ex K.Koch
  • Caprifolium germanicum Delarbre
  • Caprifolium hortense Lam.
  • Caprifolium italicum (Mill.) Medik.
  • Caprifolium magnevilleae hort. ex Dippel
  • Caprifolium pallidum (Host) Schur
  • Caprifolium perfoliatum Roehl.
  • Caprifolium rotundifolium Moench
  • Caprifolium sylvaticum Lam.
  • Caprifolium vulgare Medik.
  • Lonicera pallida Host
  • Lonicera suavis Salisb.
  • Periclymenum italicum Mill.
  • Periclymenum perfoliatum Gray

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.