Viburnaceae
Sambucus nigra
Elder · Black elder · Elderberry
- Part used
- flowerfruit
- Native range
- Europe, north Africa and western Asia; naturalised widely
- Morphology
- A shrub or small tree to ten metres with pithy stems, pinnate leaves, broad flat heads of creamy scented flowers, and drooping bunches of small purple-black berries.
What is in it
Evidence
Several small trials report shortened duration of influenza-like illness with elderberry extract. The studies are small, and some are industry-funded; larger independent replication is thin.
Safety
Raw berries, leaves, bark and stems contain cyanogenic glycosides and cause nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea; cooking the berries destroys them. Outbreaks of poisoning from raw juice are documented. Never eat the raw fruit in quantity, and never the leaves or stems at all.
Interactions: Theoretical immunostimulant concern in autoimmune disease and with immunosuppressants
Regulatory: Permitted as a food when cooked and as a listed medicine ingredient.
How the traditions classify it
Three systems, rating the same plant. Where they disagree, none of them is correcting the others — they are separate frameworks that arrived at their categories independently.
Historical use
Among the most used plants in European domestic practice — flowers for fever and catarrh, berries for colds and as a food, and the wood and leaves in a wide range of applications. Hedged about with more folklore than almost any other European plant, including strong taboos against cutting it without asking.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
Its family placement is genuinely unsettled, and this entry follows its authority rather than the commoner label. Elders and viburnums were moved out of the honeysuckles by molecular work, and most references since have called the new family Adoxaceae. But both Adoxaceae and Viburnaceae were validly published, Viburnaceae is the older name, and priority says the older one wins — which is why GBIF and Kew now use it. Expect to see Adoxaceae almost everywhere else.
Elder is the European plant most heavily wrapped in prohibition, and the prohibitions have a practical core. The taboo against cutting one without asking permission, the belief that burning elder brings misfortune, the Elder Mother who lives in the tree — all attached to a plant whose raw parts will make you vomit and whose smoke, from green wood, is genuinely unpleasant.
Whether the folklore encodes the toxicity or merely accompanies it cannot be settled. What is checkable is that the traditional preparations of elder are all cooked, in a tradition that otherwise made plenty of use of raw plants.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.