The Rappahannock Indians of Virginia make a basket of Japanese honeysuckle root runners of a wicker type weave which is crude in weaving technique in comparison with baskets from North Carolina. (Rappahannock of Virginia.) Quoting Dr. Speck, “The art was revived by some of the women in 1922, when the Indian Association was formed. Susie and Lizzie Nelson, old Bob Nelson and other Rappahannock Indians made these baskets at that time. Chief Otto Nelson, his wife Susie, and Lizzie Nelson remember that when they were young about 1890, their grandmother Sallie Ronnie, who was then about 60 years old, had a honeysuckle sewing basket shaped like an oval bowl, similar in weave to the baskets mentioned above.

“There is a native local, variety of Red Honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens) in Virginia which is not a ground runner but clings for six feet or so to trees and fences; it is finer stemmed than the Japanese variety and Indian women of the Rappahannock tribe have agreed to weave with it. All honeysuckle runners are kept soaked in water to preserve their pliability for weaving. They can be gathered and woven at any time of the year if treated in this manner.”

As far as known no other fine root runner is used for basket weaving by the Indians of this state, although other fine root runners such as Devil’s Shoestring and London Pride grow there. Comments on honeysuckle wicker-weave baskets among the Mattaponi Indians of Virginia are made by Dr. Frank Speck in his book “At Mattaponi,” in which he speaks of the girls making baskets of honeysuckle stems, meticulously neat and with a technique suspiciously European in detail. We cannot be too sure that something like this did not exist before as many references to baskets of various forms made in the early days are encountered.[4] The Pamunkey Tribe, living on a reservation ten miles south of Mattaponi, have used honeysuckle runners for over twenty years. In both bands the details of form and weave are identical, and the historical circumstances may also be.