Midsummer night’s dream fragrance

Colin Smale continues his series on the county’s wildflowers, turning the spotlight on the sweet-smelling honeysuckle.

Shakespeare, the word-master, clearly loved the natural world around him and his words always paint rich images of his subjects.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he famously writes: ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,/Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,/Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,/With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.’

Woodbine is an old-English word for the honeysuckle and is often used on the subject of romance – for example, in the Greek story of Daphnis and Chloe, the long-distance lovers could only see each other when the honeysuckle bloomed. The climbing or twining stem of any plants, such as the woodbine, reflect romance perfectly.

I used to have a honeysuckle bush right outside my back door and on late summer evenings moths of all kinds would visit the sweet-smelling blossoms. Occasionally a special visitor would appear: the fantastic hummingbird moth, a real treat.

The honeysuckle is much more than a banquet for moths though. Endless species of pollinating flies, moths and butterflies will visit the blooms and, in the autumn, its red-jewelled berries attract blackbirds, redwings, fieldfares, bullfinches, etc.

Night air
We tend to think, naively, that at night while we are sleeping ‘honeysuckle world’ sleeps too, but nature being what it is, those flying insects attract bats and so that enigmatic cycle of life red in tooth and claw goes on.

Yes, of course there is more. That twining binding growth climbs ever higher and wider forming cover for roosting and nesting sites for birds and so it goes on. If we are lucky enough to have a honeysuckle bush in the garden, we will be able to enjoy the beauty of those blossoms and the heady scent on the night air on our very doorstep.

In the countryside, the honeysuckle can be seen growing in the hedgerows among the hawthorns, the hazels and the elder but I think it is in the warm, damper air of woodlands that it thrives and is at its best.

Samuel Pepys, the 17th-century diarist, describes it perfectly when he writes of the honeysuckle, “whose bugles blow scent instead of sound.”

Absolutely right my friend.

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