What is Amur honeysuckle?

Good Amur honeysuckle identification matters because this shrub is one of the most common invasive plants on woods edges and old fields in Pennsylvania. It was planted for decades for wildlife cover, hedges and erosion control, and it escaped into the wild almost everywhere.

It’s a woody shrub from eastern Asia that grows into a dense, arching thicket. It leafs out earlier and holds its leaves later than our native plants, so it shades out wildflowers and young trees underneath it. The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture lists it as a Class B noxious weed.

Birds eat the red berries, but the fruit is low in fat and protein compared with native berries. The seeds get dropped along fence lines, under power lines and anywhere birds perch, which is why it pops up in places you never planted anything.

Amur honeysuckle identification: what to look for

The single best test is the twig. Snap or cut a stem and look at the center. Invasive bush honeysuckles have a hollow, brown pith at every stem size. Most native look-alikes have a solid center.

• Leaves: opposite pairs, oval to lance-shaped, roughly 1.5 to 3 inches long, smooth edges and a long, drawn-out tip.
• Flowers: paired, tubular, two-lipped white flowers in late May and early June that turn yellow as they age. They smell sweet.
• Berries: round, glossy, dark red, about a quarter inch across, in pairs tight to the stem. They ripen in fall and hang on well into winter.
• Shape: many stems from the base, arching outward, usually 6 to 16 feet tall.
• Bark: older stems are tan to gray with shaggy, peeling strips.

Timing is your friend. In early spring and late fall, honeysuckle is often the only green shrub in the woods, so it’s easy to map out a patch then.

Where it grows in Pennsylvania

Amur honeysuckle loves edges with some sun: hedgerows between fields, the strip where a lawn meets the woods, roadsides, stream banks and railroad grades. It moves into reverting farm fields fast and can turn a pasture into a thicket within a few years.

It handles a wide range of soils, from dry shale banks to river-bottom ground. Around central PA river valleys and wooded lots, it’s common to find it mixed with multiflora rose, autumn olive and Japanese barberry.

Amur honeysuckle look-alikes

Several other bush honeysuckles (Morrow’s, Tatarian and Bell’s) look very similar and are all invasive, so you don’t need to separate them before you remove them. They’re managed the same way.

The plants worth protecting are the natives. Dogwoods and viburnums also have opposite leaves, but their twigs have solid pith. Native bush honeysuckle (Diervilla) has toothed leaf edges and yellow flowers. Japanese honeysuckle is a vine with black berries, and autumn olive has alternate leaves with a silvery underside. When in doubt, check the pith before you cut.

How to get rid of Amur honeysuckle

The good news is the roots are shallow. The bad news is any stump left in the ground will resprout, often with more stems than before. Plan on removal plus follow-up.

• Pull seedlings: small plants come out by hand, especially after a rain. A lever-style weed wrench handles stems up to an inch or two.
• Dig or uproot larger shrubs: a mattock, a chain on a tractor, or a machine with a grapple can pull the whole root crown so there’s nothing to resprout.
• Cut and treat: if you cut shrubs at the base, the stumps need a follow-up or they’ll come back. Extension services recommend treating fresh-cut stumps with glyphosate or triclopyr. Thin stems can also be treated with a triclopyr basal-bark product on the lower stem.
• Foliar spot spray: resprouts below waist height can be sprayed from June through October with glyphosate or a glyphosate-plus-triclopyr product.
• Mowing or brush-hogging: knocks a thicket back, but it is not a cure on its own. Treat the regrowth later that season or the next.

With any herbicide, read and follow the label (the label is the law) and make sure the product is labeled for the site, especially near streams or wet ground. Applying herbicide for hire in Pennsylvania requires a PA Department of Agriculture pesticide applicator certification, so large acreage is a job for a licensed vegetation-management company.

Keeping it from coming back

Birds will keep dropping seeds from your neighbors’ shrubs, so walk the cleared area every spring and fall and pull new seedlings while they’re small. That’s a ten-minute job if you stay on it and a weekend job if you don’t.

Fill the gap with something. Bare, sunny ground invites the next invasive. Seed open areas to grass or plant native shrubs like gray dogwood, arrowwood viburnum, spicebush or serviceberry. On a big lot, mowing a cleared field edge once or twice a year keeps seedlings from ever getting a foothold.

Questions we get about amur honeysuckle

Similar weeds

Autumn OliveElaeagnus umbellataJapanese BarberryBerberis thunbergiiMultiflora RoseRosa multiflora