Rambunctious, energetic, and never offended, elderberries are powerful allies to wildlife, foragers, medicine makers, and gardeners. Elder plants have been used for millennia by people. The uses for elder are as varied and unique as the people who use them. Elderberries are extremely vigorous shrubs growing in thickets, along roadsides, in wetlands, at forest edges, and under openings in the canopy. They are shade-tolerant, but love the sun.
Species
There are 42 species of elderberry around the world; 12 in North America.
American Elderberry (Sambucus canadensis)
This species is also known as black elderberry. Native to the eastern half of North America, S. canadensis is found in a wide variety of habitats. It is a vigorous shrub producing copious amounts of shoots and berries. The tiny, dark berries form in large clusters, ripening toward the end of the summer. S. canadensis grows in wetlands, on roadsides, in forest openings, in barely moist to wet fields, and around old homesteads.
European Elderberry (Sambucus nigra)
The European elderberry is considered the same species as S. canadensis by botanists, but I have to list it here as a different species. It used to be considered separate. Botanists are constantly changing the categorizations of plants. In reality, the two plants are different enough from each other that S. canadensis will thrive here in New York State, while most cultivars of S. nigra will languish. S. nigra is less vigorous, produces fewer suckers, and is less cold-hardy. It grows less as a bush and more as a small tree.
Sambucus caerulea
This is from the western US and makes a large tasty blue berry.
Sambucus racemosa
Native to eastern woodlands, this elder makes a toxic bright red berry. It’s not as common as S. canadensis. I usually find this plant scattered about in light shade.
Healthy Productive Stems
One-year-old shoots from well-established plants can sometimes reach 8 feet tall in a single season. Many plants will produce flowers and fruit on new wood that is only a few months old. That is totally amazing to me: a stem rising out of the ground in the spring and winding up taller than me and covered in fruit by the end of the summer. How can a stem be that vigorous and productive? I don’t know; it’s amazing what elderberries can do.
Elderberries in June responding to being cut to the ground over the winter. By the end of summer, these plants were 9 feet tall with almost as wide a spread and loads of fruit.
As elderberry stems grow older, they begin to decline. After roughly five to eight years, elderberry stems will start to die. If they are not replaced by new shoots, then the whole bush can go into decline. Wild elderberry bushes rarely live past 20 years of age, but with human help they can live for much longer.
The reason elderberries can live longer with people is because we can cut them down. This may sound counterintuitive, but that is what most shrubs really need. Most shrubs have evolved to grow in open areas with abundant grazing and browsing animals. They are rejuvenated by the disturbance of a large herd of herbivores or by fire. They come from a time when they would regularly be trampled by elephants, mammoths, aurochs, and bison. When old stems die, there is new room for young shoots.
I cut most of my elderberry plants right to the ground every year or every other year. The timing is important. I cut them in the winter when they are dormant and most of their energy is stored in their root systems. In spring the plants flush an abundance of vigorous canes. These canes will reach 8 or more feet tall over the summer, branch, and produce copious amounts of flowers and fruit.
It’s important to note that some individuals will not flower on first-year wood. Second-year canes are generally the most productive. Second-year stems are more productive than first-year stems because they will have more lateral branches.
Wood
Elderberry stems have a soft pith in their centers. Weak, brittle wood surrounds the pith, which is similar in texture to Styrofoam. This pith can be punched out with a thin round file or a large nail. Taking out the pith will leave you with a hollow stem, which has multiple uses. I have seen friends turn them into flutes, my wife has made crayons with the kids, and I have used them as maple spiles.
Apparently the wood of elderberry is poisonous when fresh. So if you are going to use elder stems for flutes or maple spiles, let them dry before using. I’ve never heard of anyone experiencing any negative effects from using elder wood for these projects, and I’ve personally drunk a lot of maple sap collected from elder stems.
Elderberry flowers alone make this plant worth growing.
Flowers
The flowers of elderberry come in great big white clusters starting in early July and sometimes continuing much later into the summer. By blooming late, elderberries reliably miss typical spring frosts that damage plants like apples, peaches, and plums.
The flowers are a magnet for pollinating insects. There is a huge flurry of activity around the blooms.
They are also edible and medicinal. Elderflowers are eaten as fritters, and they are tinctured and/or dried to make a powerful immune-boosting medicine.
Fruit
Elderberries are tiny, dark berries with a unique flavor. I don’t think of them as a berry in the sense that I would want to go out and stuff handfuls of them into my mouth. They have a pretty strong wine-like flavor. Elderberries are best not eaten fresh, but processed into one of many possible products.
They are more medicine than food in my opinion, but can certainly be used for both. Many folks bake elderberries into pies; make jam, wine, or syrup; and more. We often add frozen elderberries to smoothies or oatmeal.
Where the elderberry really shines is in its powerful immune-boosting quality. Elder syrup taken regularly at the onset of a cold has kept me healthy numerous times. Some people may regard this as folklore, but I know that it’s real and so does the exploding elderberry industry, which is expected to soon surpass echinacea in herbal supplement sales.
Harvesting
Harvesting elderberries is very fast compared to any other berry I’ve collected. It takes only a few minutes to gather several pounds. I have heard people bemoan the tediousness of picking elderberries. This is just based on a lack of information. Elderberries come in great big clusters that are easily snapped off the bush. The berries are attached to thin stems in these clusters. To de-stem the berries, place the cluster in the freezer for 20 minutes or so. Tap the frozen cluster on a cookie sheet and all the berries will fall off easily. You can then put them in a bag and keep them in the freezer until you are ready to use them. I learned this trick from Sam Thayer’s book Nature’s Garden.1
Propagation
I used to live on a property where the owners regularly mowed down a huge patch of elderberry. Every time the plants would really get going and begin to flower, they would all be knocked down with a brush hog. I felt so frustrated at this that I decided to dig up and save some of the patch, even though I had nowhere to plant it. In the middle of summer on a hot day, I dug up a clump and tried to stuff it into a pot. It was too big for any pot, so I cut it into sections with an old ax and stuffed each section into a pot. Amazingly, they all lived. I planted them a year later on my own property, where they continue to thrive today, 10 years later.
Propagating elderberries is very easy and rewarding. There are numerous methods, ranging from cuttings, to root divisions, to seed. I have the most experience with cuttings. I have used both hardwood (dormant season) and softwood (summer) cuttings. Both methods have worked very well. I like to gather hardwood cuttings late in the fall and plant them out into nursery beds. Each cutting is only as long as the section between leaf nodes. I prepare the cutting so that it has a node on top. No node is needed on the bottom. I don’t use any rooting hormone on elder cuttings and usually have 90 to 100 percent success rate with hardwood cuttings; only slightly less with softwood.
Elderberries are very sensitive to being transplanted after they root if you do not wait until they are dormant. Once dormant, they are easy to transplant. If they’re in full leaf, they wilt easily and die. To prevent this, cut back at least 90 percent of the leaf matter. This will prevent wilting, and they will have a much higher success rate.
I have also grown elderberries from root cuttings. One-inch fragments of root planted at or just below the soil line in early spring can lead to enormous 6-foot plants in a single season. However, I have noticed that if I take root cuttings later in the season, they rarely sprout above the soil line at all.
I have not grown elderberries from seed, but have heard from a friend that, with stratification, it is easy.
Planting
Elderberries are not fussy about a planting site, but they will respond to favorable conditions with extreme generosity. Many people think that elderberries love wet soil and mistakenly plant them in muddy, anaerobic conditions. They can survive in places like that, but they will rarely thrive. Give elderberries a rich, well-drained soil and they will explode with growth and flower right away. They do appreciate moisture, but not saturation. High organic matter and deep mulch is the key to achieving this combination.
A hedge of elderberry. These bushes are planted 6 feet apart and cut to the ground every winter.
Deer especially love to browse elderberry. It can be so severe that elderberry populations are in decline in many areas with high deer populations. If you can protect young plants until they are well established, they can persist and thrive through a lot of browse.
Some individual elderberries are self-pollinating, but many are not. If you are planting seedlings or varieties that need a pollinator, then a 6-foot spacing works out well.
Elderberries are shade-tolerant, and can do quite well in half a day of sunlight or in dappled shade. However, they will respond to abundant sunlight, the way they do to good soil, with excellent growth.
The huge berries and fruit clusters of York elderberry.
Varieties
When I first started growing elderberry cultivars I was amazed at how big the fruit and flower clusters were. I had never seen such large berries or anything like them in the wild before. The wild elderberries are just fine for growing. It’s not hard to have a family’s yearly supply from a few wild bushes. The cultivars offer even more impressive yields. I like to grow both wild and cultivated elders.
York: Originating from New York. Self-pollinating, very cold-hardy, fruits on first-year canes; huge berries and flower heads.
Scotia: Originated in Nova Scotia. Needs a pollinator; very cold-hardy; does not fruit on first-year canes. Scotia does fruit abundantly on second-year wood. It is also incredibly vigorous, beyond anything I’ve ever seen. Large berries and blossoms.
Wyldewood: Originated in Oklahoma. Hardiness has been fine here in zone 5 upstate New York. The flower clusters are enormous, the berries of average size. It will fruit on one-year wood, but often needs two-year-old canes to be able to ripen fruit in our short, cool summers.
Bob Gordon: Originated in Missouri. This plant is incredible. Huge yields per acre, in some trials three times any other cultivar. Berries and flower clusters are good size. The big difference I see with Bob G. is that the berries are delicious, much better than any other I’ve tasted. I like to eat these fresh off the bush.
Marge: Originated in Missouri. Marge is a cross between Sambucus canadensis and S. nigra. Flower clusters and berries are very large. Supreme vigor and good hardiness here in zone 5. Selected by Marge Millican.
I planted this seedling elderberry at my mom’s house about five years before the picture was taken. It is a self-pollinating abundant producer that we have named Bubby.
Many more cultivars exist, and people continue to discover more in the wild and to breed new varieties. A lot of the work going into elderberry breeding happens at the University of Missouri. Individuals are also finding plants all the time, as interest in elderberry is growing very rapidly.
Wildlife Value
There are at least 60 species of birds that eat elderberries.2 These berries are loved not only by birds but also by over a dozen species of mammals. The bark, leaves, and buds are highly palatable to herbivores. Native elderberries host an abundance of insect diversity. These shrubs bustle with wildlife activity at a high level—on par with apple trees. They are worth planting for bird activity alone.
Elderberries are loved by songbirds and gamebirds, but are often so productive that it’s not hard for people to harvest them at the same time. I’ve never lost a crop of elderberries to birds the way I do with blueberries or serviceberries some years.
Elderflowers are an excellent source of nectar for beneficial insects.
Commercial Possibilities
There is a world market for elderberry products, primarily syrup and tincture, but also dried berries and wine. Elderberry flowers are also of commercial value. They are sold dried for tea. Elderflowers are sometimes used in cut flower arrangements.
Elderberries are consumed widely in Europe and increasingly in North America. The University of Missouri is leading the way in commercial elderberry research as numerous elderberry farms continue to spring up throughout the country. The potential exists for anyone with motivation to make an income from growing elderberry. The plants are vigorous and easy to grow, with no significant pests and very high, reliable yields.
The elderberry is a sacred plant to many people. They say that elderberries watch over children. My kids love to be around the robust elderberry bushes on our farm. They play under the shade of the plants, gather berries, and make crafts with the unusual stems. Elderberries are loved by birds, kids, tree huggers, foragers, native-plant enthusiasts, permaculturists, right-wingers, and left-wingers. Every farm, homestead, and park would do well to have an elder patch somewhere to watch over us all.