Lonicera periclymenumL.

European honeysuckle

WFO wfo-0000367818 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Lonicera periclymenum, photographed by Zeke Marshall
fig. a Zeke Marshall, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-13 / obs. 205814181

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.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Accession
K001291759
Filed as
Lonicera periclymenum L.
Det. by
Burns, E.
Collected
Burns, E; Wheeler, J; Mestre E.; Wu Z. 2021-06-30
Origin
GB
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 20 botanical countries

Regions where Lonicera periclymenum is native: Morocco, Albania, Austria, Belgium, Corse, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, NW. Balkan Pen., Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland MoroccoAlbaniaAustriaBelgiumCorseDenmarkFranceGermanyGreeceIrelandItalyNetherlandsNorwayNW. Balkan Pen.PolandPortugalSpainSwedenSwitzerland
Native distribution of Lonicera periclymenum, 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
Belgium BGM
Corse COR
Denmark DEN
France FRA
Germany GER
Great Britain GRB
Greece GRC
Ireland IRE
Italy ITA
Netherlands NET
Norway NOR
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Poland POL
Portugal POR
Spain SPA
Sweden SWE
Switzerland SWI
Morocco MOR AFRICA

Not drawn on the map: Great Britain. We hold no public-domain boundary for this region, so it is listed rather than guessed at.

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 650 in flower of 999 examined

Proportion of examined Lonicera periclymenum in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 2 12 17% 5% to 45%
Feb 2 12 17% 5% to 45%
Mar 4 21 19% 8% to 40%
Apr 5 40 13% 5% to 26%
May 60 97 62% 52% to 71%
Jun 185 219 84% 79% to 89%
Jul 170 202 84% 78% to 89%
Aug 130 213 61% 54% to 67%
Sep 52 105 50% 40% to 59%
Oct 16 31 52% 35% to 68%
Nov 18 27 67% 48% to 81%
Dec 6 20 30% 15% to 52%

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Lonicera periclymenum 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. 650 of 999 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 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 2,050 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -2.4 °C 1.7 °C 7.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 16.6 °C 20.1 °C 25.4 °C
Annual rainfall 630 mm 877 mm 1,950 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 89 mm 160 mm 281 mm

It is found where winters bring light 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 2,050 research-grade observations of Lonicera periclymenum 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.

Named cultivars 1 recorded

Selections of Lonicera periclymenum that somebody named and propagated. A cultivar is not a botanical taxon: it is governed by the cultivated-plant code rather than the botanical one, so it appears in no taxonomic backbone, and it has no native range and no wild population of its own. These get no page here, because a cultivar has no photographs, no range and no flowering data of its own, and a page with none of those is not a page.

From Wikidata (CC0), joined to this species on its World Flora Online identifier, so the link to the parent is exact rather than a name match. This list is what is recorded in an openly licensed register; it is not every cultivar that exists, and for many genera it is not close. Why, and how far short it falls.

Also published as 17 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 distinctum Moench
  • Caprifolium germanicum Roehl.
  • Caprifolium periclymenum Delarbre
  • Caprifolium quercifolium Meigen
  • Caprifolium semperflorens hort. ex Dippel
  • Euchylia verticillata Dulac
  • Lonicera hispanica Boiss. & Reut.
  • Lonicera odora Salisb.
  • Lonicera periclymenum f. sublobata A.I.D.Correia
  • Lonicera periclymenum var. belgica Aiton
  • Lonicera periclymenum var. hirsuta (Rouy) P.D.Sell
  • Lonicera periclymenum var. parviflora De Langhe
  • Lonicera periclymenum var. quercifolia Aiton
  • Lonicera periclymenum var. serotina Aiton
  • Lonicera periclymenum var. vulgaris Aiton
  • Periclymenum germanicum Mill.
  • Periclymenum vulgare Mill.

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.