First off, kudos to you for researching and asking in here before planting. That sort of conscientious gardening doesn't seem to be as common these days. To answer your question--if you cherish your garden even a little bit, don't plant this horrible exotic menace! It spreads by runners, literally creating an underground carpet that can sprout even through grass. It laughs at pruning!..."3-4 times a year" will quickly turn into 3-4 times a month. If this wasn't bad enough, it also produces small fruits the birds eat and disperse all over the place. It is truly a tenacious SOB that will never, ever die if you plant it and give it half a year to establish. To get the fragrance but not the invasiveness, try the native goldflame honeysuckle (lonicera x. heckrottii). Niche Gardens has it in Chapel Hill for a reasonable price (www.nichegardens.com; they also mail order). Goldflame isn't quite as strong as japanese; but you can always go to your local woodland edge to smell that invasive monstrosity! It certainly has no place in a garden. Any honeysuckle twines up through lattice and should last as long as the lattice itself. Best wishes for your fragrant garden! Here is a link that might be useful: Japanese Honeysuckle

hey guys, been AWOL for a few days but some interesting responses. I didn't think pokeweek died back that much in winter? I have known property owners to plant it and have seen it green and without berries in the winter. In fact I was at a property yesterday where I noticed it growing in a flowerbed. If it is a pokeweed of a weedy variety, should I kill it? It is a desirable plant for a lot of folks around here. So I have been thinking a lot about what my strategy is going to be and I think I am going to clear some places for trees to go in in the next few weeks. I was walking through the woods near my neighborhood this weekend and I walked into a large grove of white pine and I noticed that for whatever reason, these vines don't grow under them, but do grow in the surrounding areas which are made up mostly of ash, oak, and those white mullberry looking things. I think for this reason I am going to start with some white pines and plan to add to them as I am able to get control of more and more areas. Once I get a handle on how much maintenance this will take and I hopefully get some areas cleared I will add some maples and oaks and other deciduous trees. Also I've been trying to identify some good undergrowth and my shrub ID book is delayed from Amazon (shouldn't have chosen the free shipping option because I have been waiting for weeks). Anyone got any ideas on some quick growing shrubs. The links below are to the State DNR nursery and order forms. They have some low priced native plants for sale. http://www.dnr.state.md.us/forests/nursery/ http://www.dnr.state.md.us/forests/treemendous/ordertrees.asp Anyway, as always, thanks for the input.

Hi - we managed to get rid of knotweed completely - will tell you how I did it. I'm here because of a BBC article and got me remembering and thinking. I don't understand why everyone says this is so difficult to get rid of it seemed really easy to me anyway. 4 years ago we bought a flat - it had knotweed noted on the survey, it was pretty big area of huge tall weeds, but we haggled the price and bought for cash. Told we wouldn't get a mortgage because of the knotweed. Neighbours told us it was a nightmare they had battled for years and told us all the stories of council officials coming out to look at it and trying to apply for grant funding etc etc to get it dug out with JCB's and burned. Anyway, we decided ourselves to get an estimate from a professional company - priced in the £000's. I did some reading and research about the plant and controlling it. Went to b and q and bought a large quantity of the strongest glyphosate I could find, it said it could treat like 500m/sq. this patch was maybe 20 metres by 5 metres - pretty big for me anyway. It was supposed to be pretty diluted but I only used about 10% water maybe. I also bought a £15 manual spray pump and some gloves and some sponges. I went with some ladders on a Saturday morning in August, it was about 15 degrees C, cloud cover and dry. i coated every single leaf I could with the stuff - several times during the day and again after it dried off or was absorbed. I then found all the thickest stems and bunches and cut them down about halfway, and poured the stuff into the stems - filled right to the top. Then topped them off later that evening - and used the last of the strong spray solution I had made for another final spray coating. Over the next few weeks they starting visibly dying. The winter came and went and by July the following year everything was completely dead. I took plenty of before, during and after photos which I still have. That was 4 years ago I did that and not one single sign of it has returned. It cost me like £80 of materials and maybe 12 hours of my time. I knew nothing whatsoever about Japanese knotweed or plants and gardening and still don't. I was later told that national rail and the local council had actually sent 'a man' every season for 'several years' previous to our buying the place to 'spray the plants' to try and get rid of them. With little success apparently. What I find totally and utterly bizarre is that someone like me, completely clueless about horticulture and plants, was able to completely kill - permanently - a pretty substantial bank of this stuff in like 1 day, with stuff bought from the local hardware shop - and yet the Internet is full of stories and news reports of people spending fortunes and despairing in heartache over it. Was I lucky somehow? Genuinely I've always been curious about this and would welcome input from those more experienced.

If you have the time and energy, you can cut the vines, as close to the ground as comfortable to you, paint the stumps with liquid weed killer, and the tops will come down, eventually, or might be pulled down. I drilled holes in the stump of a trumpet vine and filled the holes with weed killer, so that should work with honeysuckle. Shame to do such to a native species, but Japanese Honeysuckle is a tremendous pest in my gardens.