Doubled
Geauga Lyme cases, 2025
Geauga Public Health issued an advisory in spring 2026 after confirmed Lyme cases in the county doubled over the previous year.
Invasive Species GuideBush Honeysuckle
Bush Honeysuckle
Removal in Ohio
Bush honeysuckle is the most aggressive invasive plant in Ohio. Over 75% of the state's woodlands have honeysuckle invasion, and it spreads faster than any native species can compete with. Here is how to identify it, why standard methods fail, and what actually works.
Land recovery and property protection · Northeast Ohio
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The brush, thorn and poison ivy that grew up under your good trees comes out, and what you get back is ground you can walk without watching your step.
From $295 for an afternoon's work to full estate restoration.
Identification
How to Identify Bush Honeysuckle
Ohio has two dominant bush honeysuckle species — Amur honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii) and Morrow honeysuckle (Lonicera morrowii). Both are large, arching shrubs that grow 6–15 feet tall and form dense canopies that block sunlight from reaching the forest floor.
- 1Opposite leaves. Leaves grow in pairs directly across from each other on the stem. This is one of the most reliable field identifiers because most native Ohio shrubs have alternate leaf arrangement. Each leaf is 2–3 inches long, oval, with a pointed tip.
- 2Tubular flowers. Blooms appear in May and June. Amur honeysuckle starts white and fades to yellow. Morrow honeysuckle starts white and fades to pink. Both have a strong, sweet fragrance that draws pollinators away from native species.
- 3Red berries in fall. Clusters of bright red, translucent berries ripen in September and October. Each berry contains seeds that birds eat and deposit across your property and beyond. A single mature plant produces thousands of berries per season.
- 4Peeling bark on older stems. Mature honeysuckle stems develop a shaggy, peeling bark that distinguishes them from native dogwood and viburnum. The stems are hollow if you cut a cross-section — native look-alikes have solid pith.
- 5November test. The easiest identification method: drive your property in late November after native trees have dropped their leaves. Every green patch in the understory is bush honeysuckle. It holds its leaves 2–3 weeks longer than anything native, making the invasion visible from a distance.
Why It Wins
Why Honeysuckle Dominates Ohio
Bush honeysuckle has three biological advantages that make it nearly impossible for native plants to compete:
Extended growing season. Honeysuckle leafs out 2–3 weeks before native trees in spring and holds its leaves 2–3 weeks later in fall. During those windows, it captures sunlight that native understory plants need to photosynthesize and build root reserves. Native wildflowers, seedlings, and shrubs that depend on early spring or late fall light are starved out gradually.
Prolific seed production. A single mature honeysuckle plant produces thousands of berries that birds eat and disperse. Unlike native berries that birds eat and pass locally, honeysuckle berries have a laxative effect that causes birds to defecate the seeds quickly and at a distance. This means every songbird on your property is a honeysuckle seed dispersal system spreading it to new areas constantly.
Dense monoculture formation. Once established, honeysuckle forms a closed canopy at the shrub layer that eliminates all native understory. No native wildflowers, no tree seedlings, no ground cover — just a bare forest floor under a wall of honeysuckle. Ohio woodland ecologists estimate that severely invaded stands have lost 90% or more of their native understory plant diversity.
DIY Options
What You Can Do Yourself
Hand pulling (small plants). Honeysuckle seedlings and small plants with stems under 1 inch in diameter can be pulled by hand when the soil is moist. Grip the stem at the base and pull slowly to extract the root ball. If the stem snaps and leaves the root, it will resprout — you need the root out completely. This method is effective and satisfying for scattered individual plants or new seedlings.
Cut-stump treatment (medium plants). For plants with stems 1–4 inches in diameter, cut the stem as close to the ground as possible and immediately apply a concentrated herbicide (glyphosate or triclopyr) to the fresh cut surface. The herbicide travels through the fresh cut into the root system and kills it. Timing matters — apply within 15 minutes of cutting or the wound seals and the treatment fails. Fall application is most effective because the plant is actively transporting sugars to the roots.
Honest assessment: hand methods work for scattered plants. A quarter acre of dense honeysuckle with hundreds of stems requires 40+ hours of cut-and-treat labor. At that scale, mechanical removal is more practical and less expensive than your time and herbicide costs combined.
Professional Removal
How We Remove Honeysuckle at Scale
Forestry mulching grinds honeysuckle stems, root crowns, and surface root masses into fine mulch in a single pass. The Cat HM418 mulching head processes the entire plant — not just the top growth that a bush hog cuts. This destroys the root crown where regrowth originates and grinds the stem into mulch that cannot resprout.
The mulch layer left behind serves a second purpose: it blocks sunlight from reaching the thousands of honeysuckle seeds in the soil. Honeysuckle seed banks can persist for years, and any exposed soil will germinate a new crop of seedlings. A 2–3 inch mulch layer dramatically reduces that germination by keeping the seeds in darkness.
For severe infestations where honeysuckle has dominated the understory for a decade or more, we recommend a follow-up spot treatment during the first growing season after mulching. The mulching removes 90%+ of the biomass in a single day, and targeted herbicide application on the handful of resprouts that emerge from root fragments finishes the job. This combination approach — mechanical removal followed by chemical follow-up — is the most cost-effective invasive control strategy available. Where the stand worth saving is the mature canopy above it, that work is woodland restoration — the understory goes and every good tree stays.
Professional Honeysuckle Removal
$2,300 – $2,990/acre
Standard forestry mulching rates. Honeysuckle is medium-density brush — most properties fall in the lower half of this range. Volume discounts at 2.25+ acres.
The reason most people miss
There is a part of the yard nobody walks any more.
The prickly, thorny stuff at the back of the yard does not just block your view. It builds exactly what ticks need to survive: deep shade, a layer of wet leaves underneath that never dries out, and thick cover deer bed down in. The deer bring the ticks, and the tangle keeps them there. Much of it is bush honeysuckle, though most people just call it brush.
This is the part most people have not connected. That wall of green is not just untidy — it is where they live, and it sits right between the house and everywhere the kids and the dogs actually go.
It is rarely just brush, either. That same edge is where poison ivy runs — along the ground, up the trunks, through the tangle where you cannot see it until you are already in it. Vines are what make an overgrown edge genuinely unusable rather than merely ugly, and they come out with everything else.
= Connecticut
Ohio's risk level, 2026
Ohio State researchers found the risk of encountering an infected blacklegged tick in Ohio is now comparable to Connecticut, where Lyme has been endemic for decades.
Lower
Tick risk after clearing
Work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that clearing out invasive honeysuckle cut the density of infected tick nymphs, by changing where the deer spend their time.
Clearing takes that layer out. The big trees stay, the canopy stays, and the wet tangle at knee height — the part that holds ticks and hides deer — is what goes. Research measuring invasive brush removal has found fewer of the young ticks responsible for most Lyme cases afterward.
To be clear about what that means: this is habitat work, not medicine. Clearing the brush takes away the conditions ticks depend on. It does not make a property tick-free and it is not protection from disease — keep using repellent and keep checking after a walk. We are telling you this because it is a real reason to do the work, not because it is a guarantee.
Sources: Allan et al., PNAS (2010); Bron et al., Journal of Medical Entomology (2021); Geauga Public Health advisory (2026); Ohio State University (2026).
Honeysuckle Taking Over?
Get It Gone.
Tell us the approximate area and we'll assess brush density from satellite. Fixed per-acre pricing, no hourly billing.
Ticks live in the tangle at the edge of your lawn.
Taking that cover out takes them with it, and it is a morning's work.
We'll tell you what the edge you walk would cost. From $295.
Ground you can walk without watching your step — because we take the cover out.
Without losing a tree worth keeping.