Seventy years ago, the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station suggested that gardeners try cultivated elderberries as something unusual in a fruiting shrub.
A named variety called Adams was offered for introduction through the New York Fruit Testing Association at Geneva, which propagates and tests (through its members) the new varieties selected by the Experiment Station.
The cultivated Adams is not a hybrid, but merely a selected form of Sambucus Canadensis, with a strong, vigorous habit and an abundance of fruit clusters, somewhat larger than the wild type. This is good news for herb gardeners who have long wished to secure a “mother elder” for a background plant for the herb garden.
The elder “tree” in the olden days was believed to exercise a protective influence against the attacks of witches and wizards. It was known in folklore as “mother elder” before whom the woodcutter must bow and scrape before cutting a bough. This was probably a carry-over from the days of the Druids when all trees were possessed by spirits.
So many superstitions are associated with the elder (Sambucus canadensis) that it is possible to find several in contradiction to each other. While a person was supposed to be perfectly safe in a thunderstorm under the shelter of an elder, to sleep under it was not prudent.
The narcotic smell of the flowers was believed to be noxious by some of the ancient writers, while the dried blossoms, fruit, and bark were considered a panacea for all sorts of ills. An elder stake was said to last in the ground longer than an iron bar of the same size.
Stakes From Old Wood
If you were to make stakes from old wood in the fall they might sprout leaves by spring, because that is how the cultivated variety Adams is propagated. Hardwood cuttings are taken in late winter and kept moist and cool till spring planting time in the nursery.
The large umbels of creamy white flowers, so familiar as to be sometimes overlooked along our roadsides and hedgerows, show up handsomely in the background of the herb garden. The deep purple fruit clusters hang gracefully on wiry sterns.
Elders
Elder offers the gardener a great deal, both in beauty and in usefulness. The compound leaves are not so dense that they completely shade smaller herbs growing around and under the shrub. In our area, the elder grows only five to 12 feet tall, and when the bushes are bent with their load of fruit, picking is easy.
In the south, plants are much larger, while in the far west another species, the blue-berried elder (Sambucus glauca) is a tree of 40 feet in height. The most handsome species is the red-berried elder (Sambucus racemosa), with conical clusters of white flowers followed by upright bunches of bright scarlet berries. The red berries are too bitter for jelly and the diver’s other uses for the other two.
Elders Banquet
To the gardener who would eat his herbs and have them too, the elder is a banquet. From the time the first leaf buds appear in the spring, through the period when the fragrant flowers open wide in June and on until the ripening fruit is made into jelly, this plant is edible.
The young leaves may be scalded with boiling water and added to a green salad served with French dressing. Elder flowers dipped in batter and browned in deep fat like fritters are a European delicacy. The half-ripe berries make tasty jelly that needs no added pectin.
If it is later than you think when you get around to gathering the fruit and they are all deep purple colored with no green ones to insure the “jell”, add apple juice or certo.
44659 by Gertrude B Foster