I’ve never been a plant person. I’m a terrible gardener, as we know, and the only house plants that survive at my house are orchids and succulents—ones that can handle abuse and neglect. But I realized as I was hiking with my friend Steph to check one of my favorite stands of elderberry bushes, explaining to her how I found it and how I know when to check it, that (a) I do pretty well with fruit trees and (b) elderberries have taught me a lot about plant ecology.
I honestly can’t remember how I first learned about elderberries—like real ones, not ones in British fairy stories or whatnot. I think maybe I had read this post on Hunt Gather Cook about elderflower liqueur, which I loved (and which it never occurred to me I could make myself), and that maybe led me to another post of Hank’s on elderberry cordial? I’d never seen a bush before, but possibly the post had some pics. Anyway, when I was on this same hike with another group of friends around Labor Day, I recognized the berries and picked a few panacles to experiment with. That was my first batch of elderberry cordial, which turned out well (it’s hard to mess up, honestly—you just pick the elderberries off their toxic stems, pour vodka over them, and let it sit for a month, then add sugar….).
I bumped into another BIG stand of elderberries on another hike as well; problem was, both of these spots were an hour’s drive or more from my house, and a significant hike on top of that, so not convenient. That started me on a hunt for a more convenient spot to gather flowers in the spring and berries in the fall.
Here’s the problem with trying to spot plants you’re somewhat new to ahead of harvest time, when they’re *not* in flower or fruit. They just look like…plants. I’m to the point now where I can pick out an elderberry just based on its leaves and habit, but I wasn’t then. So, I had to wait until some flowered to find then in the foothills closer to home.
Next problem: I didn’t know when they flowered, and the Internet was not particularly helpful. Why? Because there’s such a variability in mountain plants in terms of when they flower and fruit—based on elevation and exposure. Fortunately for newbie me, elderberries flower pretty continually between when they get started (usually 4th of July in my area) and when the berries ripen (usually Labor Day-ish); so, I had a grace period to get it figured out.
My breakthrough came when I was driving back from the Bay on the highway, kinda zoning out, when suddenly my Elderberry radar pinged. Sure enough, there were SCADS of bushes in flower on the side of the road—and in a pretty dry area I wouldn’t have expected to find them, compared to the other places I had seen them. But the new spot did share other characteristics with familiar spots—a sloped, eastern exposure around the same elevation (6,000-7,000 feet). As soon as I got home, I checked the map for access: Bummer, that whole slope was private land. But, I knew of a trailhead not far from there. So, a few days later, I went out to check it, and sure enough, there were elderberry bushes growing not only along the road out to the trailhead but right off the parking area itself—big, gorgeous, twisted, woody contraptions, more like trees than shrubs. Elderberries are perennial, dying back to main stems each year to survive the winter and then pushing out new growth, kinda like grape vines. I couldn’t even estimate how old the ones I found at the trailhead were, but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me decades.
I collected a liqueur-batch’s worth of flowers in the spring from this new spot, making sure to leave plenty for pollinators on each bush, and then I went back around Labor Day to harvest berries. It was an extremely dry summer, and I noticed what clusters of berries there were had been picked over pretty well by deer and birds. I decided to leave what remained for the wildlife and shift over to my original lake spot—thus the hike with Steph. The bushes here were much more abundantly fruited; still, I left plenty behind on each bush for the wildlife, just taking enough for one batch of liqueur. And as Steph and I hiked back with my bulging little sack, as I recounted the saga of how I found my little collection of foraging spots, I marveled at how much that quest had taught me not just about elderberries, their growth seasons and conditions, and the ecosystem services they provided, but also about wild plants in general. I realized that usually when I learn something, it’s from a book, or YouTube, or another person. But things that don’t talk, or even walk, can teach, too; not a revelation for a lot of people who love plants, but a revelation for me, for sure.
