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.