The honeysuckle family
Caprifoliaceae is a family that has grown considerably in the last twenty years, and not by discovery. Reclassification folded the scabious and the valerians into it, so honeysuckle, teasel, scabiosa and valerian now sit together where the older books had them in three separate families.
about 40 genera
roughly 900 species
Mainly the northern temperate zone
Everything in this guide that belongs to Caprifoliaceae
Anybody who learned plants from an older reference will know scabious as Dipsacaceae and valerian as Valerianaceae. Both were absorbed here once DNA showed how closely related they were, and the older names still appear on labels and in nursery catalogs.
They are worth recognizing rather than treating as mistakes. The same reshuffle happened across botany in the same period and the trade has never fully caught up, which is why a supplier list and a modern reference book will sometimes disagree about where a plant belongs.
What the members share is easier to see in the flower than in the habit. The petals are fused into a tube, the flowers are usually carried in pairs or in tight heads, and the whole family is built around long-tongued pollinators reaching down that tube.
Cut honeysuckle lasts one to three days, and that is not poor handling. It is a climber built to flower in place on a living vine, and the cut stem cannot keep up with what the flowers demand.
Sell it for what it does rather than how long it does it. The scent is the strongest in the family and it is at its peak in the evening, because honeysuckle is pollinated by night-flying moths and directs its effort accordingly. A cut stem in a warm room in the evening will scent the whole space, which is worth more than a week of standing still.
Scabiosa is the practical member, five to eight days and a far more cooperative flower, with the pincushion head that gives it its other name. Its seed pods are better still: papery domes that dry perfectly and hold their shape indefinitely, and they are worth cutting deliberately rather than treating as what is left over.
Honeysuckle is one of the few flowers most people have deliberately tasted. Pulling the style out through the base of the flower draws a bead of nectar with it, and generations of children have learned the trick without being taught it.
The nectar sits at the bottom of a long narrow tube, which is the whole design. Only a moth's proboscis or a long-tongued bee can reach it properly, so the flower is not wasting its reward on visitors that would take the sugar without moving pollen.
The berries are a different matter and should be treated as toxic. Several honeysuckles produce attractive red or orange fruit that will make a child ill, and the plant is worth a word of warning when it goes into a garden rather than a vase.
Valerian is the best known member outside gardening, its root used as a sedative for centuries and still sold for sleep. The smell of the dried root is genuinely unpleasant and is often compared to old socks, which cats find fascinating in much the way they respond to catnip.
Teasel is here too, the dried head with its stiff hooked bracts, and it was once a genuine piece of industrial equipment. Teasel heads were mounted in frames and used to raise the nap on woolen cloth, a job no machine did better for a long time.
Elder and viburnum sit close by and were traditionally placed in this family before being moved out in the same reshuffle that moved others in. The name Caprifoliaceae means goat leaf, from an old Latin name for honeysuckle, and nobody is entirely sure what goats had to do with it.