Elder Tree (Sambucus nigra)

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SUGGESTING much tradition and lore and several questions of interest to the philosophical botanist, the Elder (Sambucus nigra) and its allies merit attention, even if they cannot lay claim to great beauty. The tribe to which they belong, the Caprifoliacea, includes many beautiful flowering shrubs and herbaceous plants, such as the Honey-suckles, but few entitled by their size to rank as trees. Among these last are the Guelder Roses and the Elder, which agree in having regular, or perfectly symmetrical, flowers, mostly small in size, white, or nearly so, in the color of their corollas, and grouped in clusters, or "cymes," that are followed by berry-like fruits. That familiar evergreen shrub, the Laurustinus, is truly no Laurel but a Guelder Rose, Viburnum tinus.

The Elder is a tree of such mingled good and evil report, that its commonness in the neighborhood of farms and cottages is probably an example of the victory of utilitarianism over superstition. According to mediaeval notions, as Shakespeare tells us in Love's Labour's Lost, "Judas was hanged on an Elder." Sir John Maundeville, a traveler but slightly more veracious than Baron Munchausen, was shown at Jerusalem the identical tree, and the repulsive black fungus, the Judas'-ear (Hirneola auricula-Judae), may still be found growing on the stem of this ill-omened species. True, this fungus also occurs on the Elm, and there is a very different tree known as Judas-tree, from a rival tradition, viz. a blood-red flowered leguminous plant, Cercis siliquastrum; but one legend is as likely to be true as the other, and Cercis was not a native of Britain--nor the Elder either, for that matter, of Syria. To confirm its evil reputation, it has been pointed out that the wood of the Elder, though hard, is heartless, that its flowers have that narcotic perfume that is suggestive of death, and that its foliage has so strong, and, to many, so unpleasant an odor, that, in Cymbeline, Shakespeare, using it as symbolical of woe, speaks of "the stinking Elder, grief." So, too, Spenser, in the "Shepheard's Calender," speaking "of the death of some mayden of greate bloud":--

"The water nymphe, that wont with her to sing and daunce,
And for her girlond olive braunches beare,
Nowe balefull boughes of cypres doen advaunce!
The Muses, that were wont greene bayes to weare,
Now bringen bitter Eldre braunches seare."

On the other hand, the ancients as well as the moderns were alive to many of the merits of the Elder. Its hard wood, so very easily hollowed, adapted it for a variety of musical instruments, one of which, named from it the "sambuca," is supposed to have been the sackbut of the Bible, the ancestral type of the modern trombone; and Professor Henslow used, with characteristic practicality, to illustrate his lectures, when dealing with this tree, by a dissertation on the aerostatic principles of an Elder pop-gun.

Though the German name of the tree, Holdre, is said to signify hollow, it is also said to be mythologically connected with Hulda, the goddess of love; and, like love, the Elder drives away evil spirits and defeats the arts of the sorcerer, being an antidote to all his machinations. Good housewives, too, have long prided themselves on their elder-flower water and elderberry wine; and its wood is useful for skewers and shoe-pegs. From the berries a purgative extract is prepared; and the flowers, besides being used to give a Muscat flavor to some wines, are said to form, when dried, an excellent soporific antidote to snake-bites. So many, indeed, were its supposed medicinal virtues, that the great Boerhaave is said to have taken off his hat to every Elder-tree he passed. Well may our ancestors, therefore, have planted this tree at their doors, to shield them alike from bodily and from spiritual harm.

The Elder seldom reaches a great height, but its stems are sometimes nearly two feet in diameter, a size indicating an age of several score of years. The bark of the old wood is rough and corky, and of a light brownish-gray color; but the young shoots have a very pleasingly bright grass-green surface, whilst the young foliage also has a clearness and cheerfulness of tone that it loses later in the year. The leaves, which are in opposite pairs, consist of two, three, or four pairs of broadly egg-shaped, serrated leaflets, and a terminal one, each of which seldom exceeds three inches in length. The small creamy-white flowers form an erect and singularly flat "cymose" inflorescence, sometimes nearly a foot across, which is especially characterized by having five principal radiating branches.

Even in a wild state this tree exhibits a considerable tendency to vary, a disposition which naturalists have been but too apt to ignore in the subjects of their study. Thus the number of the leaflets is sometimes reduced to three, and they are almost round in outline; at other times their edges are much notched; or, again, they are more or less completely variegated with yellow or white, whilst the usually black fruit is occasionally green or white when ripe.

Such plants, with divided leaves, densely-clustered small white flowers, and juicy fruitlets, suggest many ideas as to the probable causal or purposive significance of their structure. One sees at once a connection between the arrangement of the branches (two of which spring from the stem in the "axils" of a pair of "opposite" leaves, while the next pair are given off at right angles to them, or "decussately") and that of the paired leaflets in the "pinnate" leaf. The relations between the veins, or rather the skeleton, of the leaf and its outline, is equally apparent; and it needs no great acuteness to perceive that it will require less cellular tissue, and therefore, less food, to cover this skeleton with a segmented covering than to enclose it between the surfaces of one huge undivided leaf. Here, then, we have economy of nutrition, whilst at the same time the arrangement of the leaves secures their free exposure to the necessary light and air, and the greater length of saw-tooth margin secured renders them less inviting to the tender-mouthed cattle. In rendering themselves conspicuous, the small flowers have, by the process of natural selection, shown their practical appreciation of the Belgian motto, "L'union fait la force," and, whilst in twilight the eye forms some idea of their success when it notices their spectral distinctness in the hedgerow, in a room our noses tell us that they aim mostly at attracting the insects of the dusk. Nearly all white flowers are more strongly scented in the evening. Color and perfume here go hand in hand. Perhaps, too, the small size and great number of their fruits may stand in distinct relation to the smallness and number of the fruit-eating birds of those northern temperate latitudes in which flat clusters of white flowers, whether "umbels" or "cymes," are most abundant.

The flowers of the Elder make their appearance at the end of May or the beginning of June. Its blossoming may thus be said to mark the beginning of summe. Careless as to soil, apparently luxuriating in loam, but well at home in gravel, its office seems often to be the overshadowing of the rubbish-heap of the cottage garden, whilst it absolutely rejoices when the carpenter chooses it as a prop to support his stock of planks. Dyer, the author of "The Fleece," refers to the flowering of the Elder as marking the time for sheep-shearing:--

"If verdant elder spreads
Her silver flowers; if humble daisies yield
To yellow crowfoot and luxuriant grass,
Gay shearing-time approaches."

Elder-flower water, though useful as an eye-lotion, is not to be despised as a perfume. It is, in fact, with lavender-water, our native representative of the otto and eau-de-Cologne of more flavored climes. At the same time the wine obtained from the bright black berries is not only a richly-flavored British wine, but is said to do duty on occasion for the more highly reputed liquor of Portugal. Certainly elderberries would furnish as wholesome and as palatable a beverage as logwood, with which this famous wine is said to be frequently adulterated.

These same flowers and fruits, which form some of its chief attractions to the cottager, are the chief drawbacks to the use of the Elder for ornamental purposes. On a lawn they make an intolerable litter. The irregularity of its growth and the bareness of its stems unfit it for the shady alley or the hedgerow, though in old gardens it is not infrequently seen in such situations. Its proper uses in ornamental planting, in which it should not be altogether passed over, are to be found in the wild shrubbery, in a clump of shrubs in the park, or the edge of a wood, or in any other situation in which its masses of white blossoms and clusters of black berries can appear in effective contrast to the surrounding leafage. To relieve the undeniable heaviness of its mature foliage, it may be either mixed with, or replaced by, some of the variegated forms that are in cultivation.

An undoubtedly more attractive plant for such purposes is the Dwarf Elder, or Danewort (Sambucus ebulus). Though a perennial, its herbaceous stem hardly entitles it even to rank as a shrub; but its noble foliage renders it worthy of more notice at the hands of our landscape gardeners, and, though uncommon either in a wild or in a cultivated state, it is too fine a plant to be here passed over unpraised.

It seldom exceeds four feet in the height of its main stem, which terminates in a cluster of flowers; but the leaves are made up of from five to eight pairs of lance-shaped, smooth, but serrated leaflets, each of which is nearly six inches long, so that they measure as a whole some twelve inches in width, and, with the terminal leaflets, nearly eighteen inches in length. These grand leaves are surmounted, in July or August, by a flat cluster of flowers, whose corollas are pink on their under surfaces. To this cluster there are three main branches. The five stamens in each little flower have purple anthers and crumpled filaments; and in autumn the clustered blossoms give place to numerous small round berries, ripening from red, through a dark shining purple, to an almost pure, though lustrous, black, and forming at once an attractive feast to our feathered friends and to the human eye searching into the beauties of the landscape in the fall of the year. Besides the herbaceous stem, the Danewort is further distinguished from its congener, the Elder, by the possession of distinct ovate, leafy, and saw-edged stipules at the base of its leaves. Though the traditions to which the plant owes its more familiar name allege that this Dwarf Elder grows only in spots once watered by the blood of our ancient invaders, the Danes, it will not, as a matter of fact, be found in the least unaccommodating in the question of soil. If they will only "give ample room and verge enough," the happy possessors of a shrubbery cannot do better than find a place in it for the Danewort.

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