Elderberries glisten like the eyes of mice. Small and glossy black, the drupes on their purple-stemmed umbels hang for the plucking, each with a glint of autumn sunlight and filled with summer’s juice, waiting to be snaffled. I taste one or two, but they always remind me that I once ate so many elderberries I was sick. Rabbits don’t like them either.
According to weather lore English summers begin with elder flowers and end with elder berries. The elder has been venerated, in an off-hand informal way, as one of the most popular trees or shrubs in European magic and folklore.
As an ancient cult tree it was Christianised through the belief that it was the wood of the holy cross, but it retains a more earthily vernacular reputation. Few trees hold a richer gazette of stories about them: the elder is associated with hiding places for witches, religious symbolism, magical healing, herbal medicine and country legends.
Elder is a “culture follower”, a plant that travelled with people, who scattered its seeds and encouraged it around their settlements. My father told me he learned how the young pithy stems of elder could be hollowed into whistles, and I can imagine that sound carrying through the air thousands of years back to nomadic hunter-gatherer children in this same landscape. Perhaps they were calling to or warding away the travelling blackbirds and thrushes that would also strip the elders bare.
In spring, elder stems leak sap, which attracts aphids. The sap-feeding aphids secrete honeydew, which attracts ants. The pastoral ants feeding on the honeydew protect the aphids and the tree from predators but do not deter the itinerant pollinators.
The berries then are produced by a much wider culture than people making puddings, hooch, hair dye, blood-purifying cures or counter-spells; they depend on communities of insects, and they feed other communities of birds and mammals to disperse themselves.
First to leaf, first to flame, bringers of food, music and magic, when they pop up near our homes or on waste ground they are not weeds, they are a gift of wonders.
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