You can easily grow native elderberry (Sambucus L. ssp. canadensis) in semi-shaded areas with moist loam or clay soils, or in rain gardens. Their wild habitat is floodplains, shorelines and edges of swampy woods.
This species has pinnate leaves, each with seven leaflets, and interesting gray bark with lenticles that look like salt on pretzel sticks. The multi-stemmed shrub grows about 6 feet tall with stems of soft wood with large pith. This member of the honeysuckle family (Caprifoliaceae)has a rank odor when cut.
Its showy, white, flat-topped flower heads, or cymes, are as large as saucers. They are pollen-rich, attracting diverse species of bees, beetles, and flies. Once pollinated, birds and small and large mammals relish the numerous ripe fruits, while box turtles may eat the fallen fruits. Take care not to confuse this edible species, American black elderberry, with its cousin, the red elderberry (S. racemosa), which is poisonous.
Remember your mom warning you against eating berries growing around the neighborhood because the berries were sure to be poisonous? It’s one of those blanket instructions meant to keep kids safe. But unfortunately, it gives children the idea that it’s “us vs. nature.” And, as it turns out, that’s not necessarily so.
As anecdotal proof, I offer my daughter. When she was 2, she grew impatient with my weeding the flower garden. “Stop playing with your plants!” she cried.
Well, I kept weeding. After a while I noticed she had a daylily leaf dangling from her mouth and green dribble running down her chin. “I’m a beetle eating your plants!” she declared.
Of course I warned her against munching on any plants anywhere, anytime. But, as I found out later, she occasionally snacked on unknown plants and berries, and lived to tell me the tale.
I don’t know if she ever ate black elderberries, but Sambucus nigra L. ssp. canadensis, or American black elderberry, is indigenous to our yard, which goes way back. Because they would grow so big, I used to weed out elderberries along with pokeweed (Phytolacca americana), even though I admired pokeweed’s exotic hot pink stems with sinister-looking purple berries in the fall.
When I turned to native gardening, however, I began to let some of the elder and pokeweeds grow. The elder gifted my yard with handsome foliage and cymes of fragrant white flowers. You could see the flower heads a block away.
One day, when the elderberry clusters ripened to purple, a young robin started gobbling them up, calling so exuberantly between bites that I worried a hawk would whisk him away.
Three days later the berries were gone and the robin family took off, nesting season over.
About this time the Ebola scare hit the news. As it happened, I was reading Stephen Harrod Buhner’s “Herbal Antivirals: Natural Remedies for Emerging & Resistant Viral Infections,” in which Buhner reports that elder — a term he prefers to elderberry — is an important medicinal plant effective not only against influenza, but likely to prove effective against Ebola.
That caught my attention. I harvested some elderberries and stored them in my freezer, just in case. And I read more in Buhner’s.
Buhner’s books on herbal medicines, “Herbal Antivirals” and “Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-resistant Bacteria,” are in a class (pun intended) by themselves. While popular books on herbalism typically provide a page or two on the medicinal uses of each included herb, they rarely cite scientific studies. In contrast, Buhner provides 23 pages of text just on elder in “Herbal Antivirals,” much of it on the plant’s chemistry and what’s known to science. And that’s all text, no photos – you have to look up images elsewhere.
For each plant he cites, he explains when and what part of the plant to harvest, how best to prepare and use the different forms of medicines, and the known side effects and contraindications. He also touches on ways that related species are used in other countries and cultures, and he details information on human and clinical trials. In those sections he’s clearly laying out facts to entice researchers; a medical dictionary or education is needed to follow the information. As you might expect, his books have exhaustive bibliographies.
So the following information is guided by Buhner’s writings with the exception of any mistakes, which are mine.
Elder, a native of Europe and grown in North America with relatives in Asia and Australia, has been used worldwide and forever for a variety of ailments.