Found over 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. Meant for a warmer climate, I know that she would never survive our cold Winters... So, she became a permanent resident in our Solar Room.

For years, she did fine and flowered profusely each very Spring. But back in the Winter of 2016/2017 (while I was out of town for a few weeks), my husband forgot to water the honeysuckle and some of my hibiscus plants. When I got home, they all looked dead as a doornail. All the hibiscuses really were dead and had to be thrown away. That was a disappointing loss because I had a lot of unique hibiscuses in pots.

Because one section of the honeysuckle vine wasn't totally brittle, I didn't throw her out with the other dead plants. Instead, I continued to water her whenever I watered my other houseplants. This honeysuckle didn't have a single leaf on the vine for over 18 months. Just when I was about to finally give up in the Spring of 2019 (and throw the plant away), a few leaves suddenly developed. Just a few. The poor plant still looked pretty well gone. Nothing changed for the next year. But in the Spring of 2020, a few more leaves appeared, along with a couple of flowers & some new growth. Spring of 2021, the plant miraculously really came back to life with a ton of new growth and flowers.

That brings us to 2022. In February, we lost a lot of the house plants in our unheated Solar Room from freezing cold. Some were very old and always had survived past cold snaps. It was sad to lose them. Over 50% of my redeveloped hibiscus collection was also lost in early 2022. The remainder now don't look so great and probably won't flower this year, even if those do somehow manage to recover from their wintertime trauma. I've had to prune them way back in hopes of stimulating new growth.

Surprisingly, the honeysuckle vine did fine during the 2022 cold snap & is now just starting to bloom again. She has been part of the "everyday" at our house for now over 20 years. She only flowers once a year for a couple of weeks, but I still am fond of this old plant.