Yellow honeysuckle is a woody, trailing, climbing vine that can sometimes be shrublike.
Flowers are 1 inch long, tubular, with protruding stamens, in crowded, terminal clusters above a platterlike union of 2 joined leaves that clasp the stem, bright yellow or orange-yellow, lacking purple, rose, or brick red along the tube.
Blooms April–May.
Leaves are simple, opposite, sessile, thick, egg-shaped, with a gray, not white underside, tips round to blunt. Upper pair just below the flowers united at the base to form a disk that is about 6 inches across and 2 inches wide, sometimes rounded.
Fruit is a red or reddish-orange berry.