When love turns sour

In which one of our Southern gentleman’s most beloved childhood plants becomes an unfortunate nemesis.

Ivy, bramble and honeysuckle,” as St Paul might have put it in his Epistle to the Gardeners, “and the fiercest of these is honeysuckle.” Time was when I loved the stuff. Consider its name. Nothing’s sweeter than honey or more innocent than suckling. And I did, as a child, I suckled.

Thus: take a single honeysuckle flower, one of those stretched trumpets of orange and white. Pluck it in high summer and be sure to pluck it whole. It will feel firm. Protruding from the trumpet there will be a long and drooping rod that I think of as a stamen but that may be something else. It’s tipped with a tiny button.

Pinch the base of the flower between your thumbnail and middle fingernail, pinch through the outer flesh, the petal flesh, but not through the base of what may or may not be the stamen. Then slowly pull that maybe-stamen back through the flower tube, easing the buttoned tip towards you. When it emerges from the narrow bottom end, it will have gathered – if you’ve got the season right, and if you’ve done the surgery right, and if you’ve done the easing right – a tiny liquid globe, a sticky bead, reflective and transparent, a gram or less of nectar. Drop it on your tongue. Swoon and go again. Aged six I could spend half a summer’s afternoon plucking a honeysuckle hedge. Where the bee sucked there sucked I, a freckled five-stone bee in terylene shorts.

But that was then and this is now, and now I am at odds with honeysuckle. It started with a shoot or two that came over the fence from next door. It was not the neighbour’s fault, for they had been red-zoned after the earthquakes and were no longer there to keep their honeysuckle down.

I pruned the shoots and tipped them with my other garden rubbish down a bank at the back of my place. Out of sight, out of mind.

Eight minutes later the honeysuckle had rooted. Twenty minutes later it had sprouted. An hour later it had twirled its loving tendrils round the delicate stem of something and you could hear it giggling. But I stopped my ears, turned my eyes away and five years later the honeysuckle had so swamped a corner of my estate that I hardly knew where to start.

But start I did, last week. I plunged into the walls of honeysuckle as 19th century explorers plunged into the jungles of Africa, except that I went armed with a natty new thing from the hardware store, a battery-operated hedge trimmer with a chattering snout like one of those odd Amazonian dolphins. Into the greenery I sank it. Sometimes it was overwhelmed, choked by the honeysuckle drapery, the beds of honeysuckle stems. But I called out to encourage it, and I hauled it free and went again. For half an afternoon I slit the thin-spun flesh.

When the batteries gave up, I didn’t. I went a spraying, my signature mix of glyphosate and woody weedkiller and a little penetrant to taste. I filled the air with death.

But I don’t fool myself. I have scotched the snake not killed it. It will come again. This is only the first battle in a long war. Oh what a difference six decades can make. From suckling babe to slaughterman. 