PlantFiles: American Elder, Common Elderberry
Sambucus nigra subsp. canadensis

I love Elderberries! They make the very best jelly! The whole tree is actually poisonous including the unripe berries so make sure the berries are purple and not green. The berries also need to be cooked and not eaten raw.

They grow wild here in Missouri, usually along fence rows. I have tried planting and growing my own but so far, they keep dying.

Elderberries are antiviral and a tincture is made from them for fighting colds and flu. The best one for that is Sambucus Nigra which is native to Europe. The native species that grows in the US is Sambucus Canadensis and not Nigra.

I have twenty Adams and St John Elderberry Plants and they are magnificant in growth and fruit. They are easy to grow organicaly and they produce huge amounts of berries that I use for Jelly and Wine. If you keep the wine covered up and out of the light. It wil reward you with a deep purple liquid.
Suckers and new plants can be kept out of growth with a regular mowing aroung the plants as they are spread out far enough to mow between and pruned regularly to keep a nice shape. The flavor of elderberry is fantastic and I would recommend it to anyone who can grow one. Even one bush will yield a lot when it matures.

The elderberries I have all came from one plant, there are no others for at least a mile and they produce fruit every year. I make juice and can it for mixing later with other fruit juices. When I can it I don't add sugar, so it can be used for jelly. My bushes are tall so my neighbor helps me harvest them, a real teamwork deal where she holds the branches with a garden rake and I cut the clusters. I'll post a picture of last year's harvest.

Lake Sam Rayburn, Zone 8
I look out my kitchen window & view a grove of American Elderberry. My daughter made Elderberry Jelley & gave as Christmas gifts in 2004.

This is only one of God's great gifts to man and birds!
This wonder plant is self sustaining: no fungi, chewing or sucking insects and makes a great privacy fence!

It grows wild in southeast Texas. We consider it a treasure!

I love elderberries, especially in jelly and pie and muffins. They grow wild in the Catskills, both the naturalized European red-berried cultivars and the native black. The black taste much better to me, although they are mildly toxic raw. I regularly fight the bears to collect the wild ones in my mountain neighborhood--and they are very popular with the bears. They thrive along streambanks and other moist areas. However, I have had no luck growing the cultivated elderberries, Johns, Adams, and one or two other cultivars. I planted them on a sunny hillside where my black currants have thrived, and a native wild red elderberry also thrives, but they died back after two seasons.

I suppose it must say something about the nature of my Florida garden that elderberry is a "weed" in my garden, both coming up from seed and from rapidly spreading underground rhizomes sending up suckers several feet from the parent clump. I am trying to reduce the amount of elderberry that I have to get in more diversity, but there will still be plenty left in the wetlands at the edge of my garden. It is now in flower in our area.

I have seen this growing in the wild in many places in Northern Broward County (Zone 10). It is readily visible due to the color of the leaves. Especially striking when in bloom.

I have never seen berries, perhaps they are picked clean by the birds.

I rescued a sucker from a lot near my home and have planted it in the garden. It is growing well, almost 3 feet in 6 months. I am now waiting for it to flower.

The elderberry shrub is lovely with its white flowers and purple berries.
The birds love the berries and if they leave some for us we make an excellent jam with them that is my favorite flavor. We enjoy this shrub very much.

This is another great bee plant! When it blooms on hot summer days, the smell is the best, like honey on the air! A wonderful food for many kinds of birds, but the roots seem to go on forever! I have seen it in bloom/full fruit in late Dec./Jan. here in South La. I believe it blooms in almost every month of the year here, provided the frost doesn't touch it.

Elder flowers make a good expectorant, especially for children. If eradicating, don't burn the wood - it releases toxins when burnt that can harm us. Also don't let children chew on stems or leaves, as they are also toxic.

I found this plant growing extensively on a piece of property I owned in Southern Oregon in the early 1970's, in a sunny spot near a creekbed, and every year my neighbors, an elderly couple who knew a lot about "folk ways" would ask me for my berries as they made elderberry wine with them, and also jam or jelly and fresh pies. They also made blackberry wine, and it was really interesting to see the purple fruit juices fermenting in five gallon crocks. For my generosity in giving them all my berries, which I wasn't using anyway, they would give me some small bottles of their homemade wine for the Holidays, and it actually tasted pretty good if you like sweet wine, and I do. It wasn't French or Napa Valley, but it was hearty and pretty good with a traditional Holiday meal.

Elderberries will grow here in Northcentral Florida, zone 8b, and I plan on acquiring some of the many named cultivars that produce good fruit, rather than the more ornamental types, as I just might try my own hand at making elderberry wine some day. Two different varieties are needed for pollination, and the flowers can also be used along with the fruit for wine making.

I love this plant - great for drawing birds! It does tend to become agressive, spreading by both root and seed. Seedlings are easily pulled, but the roots...

Excellent choice for naturalizing an area. Does fine just under the dripline of our maple and right next to the spruces, so it tolerates root competition. Puts out a lot of growth each year and blooms on new wood, so feel free to prune heavily to keep it in check. Birds (and some people!) love the berries. The big clusters of berries weigh the branches down, which may be unhandy if it's right next to a path. Its habit is more open then dense, so it doesn't work well for screening unless you have a real thicket of it.

Elderberry is a large shrub or small tree often with multiple stems that are spreading or arching. The trunk is usually short. The leaves are pinnately compound, opposite and deciduous with 5-7 pairs of toothed leaflets and a grooved rachis. The twigs are stout and green-gray with lenticels and crescent-shaped leaf scars. The bark is gray and smooth with corky projections.

The flowers are small, white, borne in dense, flat-topped clusters, up to 8 inches across and appear mid-summer (June to July.) The fruit is small, berry-like drupes, purple-black, and very juicy, up to 1/4 inch in diameter. They are borne in flat-topped clusters, maturing July to September.

Elderberry is found on wet to moist sites in the east and central U.S. It does not tolerate shade.