Sambucus cerulea

Sambucus cerulea

Blue Elderberries are abundant and delicious in the late summer and fall months. Even though the individual berries are small, they grow in large clusters, so it is easy to gather a lot of them. I enjoy snacking on a cluster full of berries while on a hike. They have a tart and pleasant flavor. I save a few from the cluster to throw out somewhere else, where hopefully they will grow into more elderberry bushes.

Elderberries are fairly easy to identify. The leaves are opposite and compound. Compound means that botanically, each leaf is a collection of leaflets (5-9) on a short branch. Opposite means that the leaf branches occur in pairs on opposite sides of the main stem. The leaflets are longish and tapered, with serrated edges. The center of the stalks is filled with pith. The closest thing to Sambucus cerulea (blue elderberry) in this area is Sambucus racemosa (red elderberry). The difference is obvious in the fall when the berries are ripe, but you can tell them apart earlier because blue elderberries grow in flat-topped clusters, while red elderberry clusters are more rounded. Another look-alike is Dogwood, which has similar opposite compound leaves, but the stem-bark is red, and dogwood flowers have 4 petals, while elderberry flowers have 5 petals.

Besides nibbling them on the trail, I like to collect bunches of them in the fall and make elderberry syrup. Once you train your eyes to see them, you can spot the bushes from a distance, and wander from bush to bush, breaking off large clusters of the ripe berries from each one. Later at home, the berries need to be removed from the stems, and one way to make this easier is to freeze the berries first, so that they can be easily stripped of the stems without worrying about crushing them too soon and losing the juices. I have used either a mechanical juicer or boiled and strained them to extract the juice. Using the juicer makes a thicker end product with more solids in the juice. I then combine the elderberry juice with about an equal amount of sugar or honey, boil it, and preserve in jars. This syrup is delicious on pancakes and is also a good medicine for colds and flu. The syrup tastes even better when combined with 1 part hawthorn berry for 4 parts elderberries.

One of my other favorite uses for elderberry is to use the old dried stalks as hiking poles. They are light-weight because of the center pith and smooth on the outside, so they are easy to hold. While they are not as strong as heavier woods and will break eventually, they are adequate for hours of hiking and the lightness is appreciated for that.

Red Elderberries are also edible, but have higher amounts of "cyanide producing glycosides" in the seeds, so they need more careful processing. I have not personally used them yet, but here is a good first-person account. The bark and leaves of all elderberries are considered toxic; only the berries and flowers are considered edible. Also, note that until recently, blue elderberry was considered a subspecies of black elderberry (Sambucus nigra ssp. cerulea), so the scientific literature for Sambucus nigra applies to blue elderberry as well.

Nasturtium officinale

Nasturium offincinale

(notice the seed pods)

Watercress is a traditional food in Britain, where the herb was originally found in the wild, but became so popular that they have to cultivate it now to keep up with the demand. It is a member of the mustard family, and can be quite spicy on its own, but goes well with other food.

To find watercress, you must find clean, slow-moving water. Often that means a natural spring, but it can also be found growing in small rivulets. The biggest clue from a distance will be the white flowers with four petals. Upon closer examination you should find the alternate compound leaves. (Compound leaves look like a branch of smaller leaflets, but botanists consider it a single leaf.) Finally, find the sea pods, which should be growing underneath the flowers, unless it is very early in the spring. Technically, seed pods in the mustard are called "siliques". But the important thing is that they are about a centimeter long and slightly curved. You've found your watercress. Remember to make sure your water is clean. Usually that means no farm animals grazing upstream.

When I eat watercress plain, I can only enjoy a single stem's worth before it gets rather too burny-hot. However it combines very well with other food and in salads. I tried it the British way, on a sandwich with butter and hard-boiled egg, and I was piling more and more watercress on, because it tastes very good, and the egg and bread remove most of the hot spiciness.

Watercress has a lot of vitamins and some trace minerals. Compared to the same amount of spinach it has about twice as much vitamin C, a quarter the amount of vitamin A, and about half as much vitamin K. It has similar amounts of calcium, about half as much potassium, and about a quarter the magnesium and manganese as spinach.

Note that the ivory-tower botanists are still bickering over what to call watercress in Latin. Many call it Rorippa nasturtium-aquaticum instead of Nasturtium officinale. It has no relation to the garden flowers called nasturiums. Recent DNA studies are placing it closer to the Cardamine genus than the Rorippa genus, to which I say, "duh!"

I also noticed that there is something called "fool's watercress". This is a member of the carrot family. The flowers have five petals (not four, like watercress), and like all the carrot family, the flowers grow in umbels (all the flower stems come from a single point). In the mustard, including with watercress, the flowers grow in racemes, where each flower branches off individually from a central stalk. Fool's watercress is also edible, but some other members of the carrot family are poisonous.