Elder

Elder is Sambucus nigra, and it is a case where the folk enthusiasm and the actual chemistry both need stating.

The flowers and the cooked ripe berries are food. Elderflower cordial, fritters and wine are ordinary preparations; elderberry is made into wine, syrup and preserves. There is a real and continuing body of clinical investigation into elderberry extracts and the duration of influenza and cold symptoms, with some positive trials, small sample sizes and unresolved questions about preparation and mechanism. It is one of the more plausible folk remedies and it is not established.

The rest of the plant is another matter. Elder leaves, bark, roots, and unripe or raw berries contain cyanogenic glycosides, principally sambunigrin, which release hydrogen cyanide on digestion. Raw or under-ripe berries in quantity cause nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea, and there is a documented mass poisoning incident in California in 1983 from juice pressed from berries with leaves and stems included. Cooking destroys the glycosides, which is why every traditional preparation of the berry involves heat, and why a tradition can be practically safe without anyone in it knowing why.

Culpeper describes elder as a whole medicine chest and uses every part, which is a fair description of how it was treated. He also assigns it to Venus. That attribution is worth flagging, because it sits awkwardly with the folklore.

The tree is structurally odd in a way that shaped its uses. Elder wood has a wide core of soft pith which pushes out easily, leaving a natural tube, so elder was the standard material for whistles, pipes and bellows nozzles, and the name Sambucus is generally connected to a musical instrument.

The elder is one of the few European trees with a well-attested guardian spirit and a protocol for dealing with her.

The Elder Mother, Danish Hyldemoer, and cognate figures in German and English tradition, is held to inhabit the tree, and the requirement is to ask leave before cutting it. The formula recorded in English and Scandinavian sources runs to the effect of: Old girl, give me some of thy wood, and I will give thee some of mine when I grow into a tree. Burning elder on the hearth was widely held to be dangerous or to bring the Devil down the chimney, and elder was nonetheless planted deliberately by houses and byres as a guard against witchcraft and lightning. A tree that both protects and must be placated is doing two jobs.

This creates a real tension with the planetary attribution. Culpeper puts elder under Venus, which reads it as a benign, healing, cooling plant, and that fits the flowers and the berries. Modern occult compilers frequently reassign it to Saturn instead, on the strength of the guardian spirit, the funerary associations, the taboo on burning, and the tree's habit of growing on graves and waste ground. That reassignment is not a correction of Culpeper by better evidence; it is a different tradition weighing a different set of facts and reaching a different answer.

Both attributions are therefore defensible on their own terms and neither is ancient. The honest description is that the source disagrees with the modern consensus, and that the disagreement is about which half of the tree's reputation counts.