Found 20 years ago in the outdoors "Lawn & Garden" section of the now defunct Kmart, I have always grown this outdoors vine indoors as a houseplant.

For years, she did fine and flowered profusely each very Spring. Then, 4 Winters ago, my husband forgot to water the honeysuckle and some of my hibiscuses while I was out of town for a few weeks. They all looked dead as a doornail when I got home. The hibiscus were. However, not all the branches of the honeysuckle were brittle to the point of being firewood. Most were, but not all. Because I couldn't bear to part with her, I continued to water my dead looking honeysuckle whenever I watered my other houseplants. Nothing happened for about 15 months. There was not a single leaf on this plant for well over a year.

Just as I was about to finally give up and throw the plant away, I was shocked to see a few leaves suddenly appearing in the Spring of 2019. Just a few. The poor plant still looked pretty well gone. Things didn't change any more for the next year. But in the Spring of 2020, some more leaves appeared; along with some flowers & new growth.

Then, we got hit by the February 2021 arctic blast when our Solar Room got down to below freezing. I was almost certain that would be the end of "Southern White". She was one of the plants that was too big to bring into the main part of our home during that freezing cold snap. The best I could do was place her next to one of the space heaters in the Solar Room & hope for the best. I lost a lot of plants during last Winter's extreme cold blast. However, my "Southern White" honeysuckle wasn't one of them. She looked about the same after the arctic blast as before. Not great, but alive & with a few random leaves.

Now this May, she has really come back to life. It's been amazing. She is covered in both leaves and flowers like when I first bought her. She again looks pretty like she did before she ever went through her hardships. It's almost hard to believe. As dead as she had looked in the Winter of 2017, most probably would have said it was stupid to keep watering her in hopes of a miracle. But for some reason, I did. Even when she wasn't so pretty & looked liked a lost cause, I continued to give her love. Today, she is again pretty. Who would have thought?

Above is the very first flower on her for the season. She is covered with hundreds.

Some botanical gardens have been the source of allowing exotic plants to "get free" and then altering the local environment. Ditto with some landscape plants planted at private residents. This honeysuckle was sold to be an outside plant. However always being grown indoors, there is no chance that my white honeysuckle will ever produce offspring that can escape into the wild and crowd out native plants and wildflowers. Many white honeysuckles have the bad reputation of doing this. This is a problem in our area: https://pbase.com/britestar/image/169179834 Not that a plant with the name of "Southern White" could ever survive outdoors here in our brutally cold Winters... I also suspect that my honeysuckle may be a native to the USA species.

Now that K-Mart (once almost an American institution) is gone, "Southern White" represents more to me than just a plant with pretty flowers that I like a lot. She brings back memories of a time and a place that are now forever gone. Additionally, she also has her own unique history. Isn't it funny how the most mundane things in our lives can have such memories connected to them?