Elderflower

The elderflower is begining to come out and I have been harvesting from the same few trees for the past three years and I love watching them start to flower! There is something almost ceremonial about the moment the flower heads open fully, those wide flat clusters of cream white blossom appearing as if the tree the decision overnight.

The scent is extraordinary and strange, sweet with an undertone that takes a moment to place, and once you have spent enough time with it you start to understand why this plant accumulated the folklore it did. There is something very old in that smell.

Sambucus nigra has been part of human life for at least four thousand years. Elder seeds have been recovered from Neolithic settlements in Switzerland, and around 800 CE Charlemagne decreed that every household should plant one, which tells you something about how central this tree was to everyday medicine across Europe for centuries.

The name Elder comes from the Anglo-Saxon aeld, meaning fire, a reference to the hollow pithy stems once used to blow life into dying flames. The botanical name Sambucus connects to pan pipes made from that same hollow wood.

The flowers are gathered from late spring through midsummer and the method of preparation changes what you are working with. A hot infusion of dried flowers acts as one of the most reliable fever remedies in the Western herbal tradition, encouraging perspiration by softening tension in the peripheral blood vessels. Jim McDonald describes it as among the oldest and most dependable remedies available for colds, flu, and the muscular aching that accompanies fever. Once the same infusion cools, it changes, moving from diaphoretic toward alterative and diuretic, supporting lymphatic clearance and kidney function. The flowers are also an effective decongestant for the upper respiratory tract, clearing mucous congestion in the sinuses during hay fever season (ideal for this time of year!) or in the wake of a cold.

In Folklore the elder was said to be inhabited by HyldeMoer, the Elder Mother, a presiding spirit of considerable power who protected both the tree and those who lived near it. Cutting elder wood without asking permission first was considered genuinely dangerous. The practice was to speak your need aloud and wait for her consent, understood as silence. Maude Grieve records this in A Modern Herbal, drawing on Lady Northcote's Book of Herbs.

The belief that elder carried faery presences ran through many folk cultures with consistency. It was said that sleeping beneath the tree on certain nights was understood as an invitation for the soul to be taken and children's cradles were never made from elder wood. In communities that observed them, these were taken seriously across generations.

The association between elder and the dead, and the ancestors more broadly, runs through the folklore of multiple cultures too. The tree stood at the threshold between the living world and what lay beyond it, which is reflected in how it was used in both protective and funerary practice. Elder works at these thresholds. In folk magical practice it appeared in workings connected to ancestor contact, to grief that had not yet found its way through, and to protection that comes from relationship with those who came before rather than from warding something away. Branches placed at the entrance to the home were understood as inviting the protection of the Elder Mother herself.

The flowers, gentler and more cooling in nature than the berries, are used in workings around purification, the easing of fear, and the opening of perception. Infused into water and used in ritual bathing at midsummer, when the tree is in full flower and the year sits at its most luminous point, they carry the quality of that threshold the plant has always occupied.

I come back to the same elder tree's each year and I always ask permission first before I take anything from them, and not until Hylde-Moer has given consent by keeping silence may the harvesting begin💚