BY JOHN MOODY
In This Article
In a humble 17th-century Western European village, a grandma makes elderberry tea for her sick grandson.
In a Mediterranean house in the 10th-century, a man uncorks last year’s elderberry wine, now ready to enjoy over dinner with friends.
In a Roman town in 223 AD, a physician makes a paste of elderberry leaves and other herbs to apply to an unknown skin infection on his patient.
On the Great Plains of America, an Indigenous father cuts wood from a bush to fashion into a new flute for his son, while in Greece, a young lady plays the sambuke, a wooden stringed instrument.
What do these people, diverse through time and geography, have in common?
A native plant known by many, many names—Arbre de Judas, Baies de Sureau, Black Elder, Holunderbeeren, Sambucus nigra, Sauco, and Sureau Noir, among others. To us, it is known as the elder or elderberry
If the dog is humanity’s best friend, then the elderberry may be its best plant friend, because this shrub has been part of our lives for thousands of years.
Ancient Elderberry
Elder has attracted unusual attention across cultures and centuries, and with good reason. Archaeological evidence shows elder seeds at sites more than 9,000 years old, and few plants offer the same “one-stop” combination of food, medicine, and craft material in a single, fast-growing shrub.
Much of what is known today about elder’s traditional uses comes from Greek and Roman writers, who laid the groundwork for botany, pharmacology, and medicine.
Hippocrates, often called the “Father of Medicine,” described preparations from elder roots, leaves, and juice for various complaints, while Galen, Theophrastus, and Dioscorides all documented elder’s purging, diuretic, and wound-soothing properties.
Dioscorides’ famous De Materia Medica lists elder for skin ailments, dropsy, and snakebites, noting that nearly every part of the plant—from roots and leaves to fruit—could be used in specific ways.
Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder devoted an entire chapter to elder in On the Materials of Medicine, describing decoctions, poultices, and baths made from its leaves, bark, roots, and berries for problems ranging from burns and brain abscesses to gout and edema.
He even noted its use as a hair dye and an insect deterrent, alongside references to its hollow stems for whistles and popguns—early hints of elder’s role beyond medicine. Over time, this rich ancient record helped earn elder nicknames like “the people’s medicine chest,” and modern common names such as “elder” and “elderberry” likely trace back to early words for fire-kindling, a nod to its hollow branches once used to carry and coax flame.
The modern names for the tree also have Greco-Roman roots. ‘Elder’ likely comes from aeld or ellarn, words meaning ‘to kindle’ or ‘fire,’ a nod to the plant’s long, hollow stems, which are excellent for blowing air into a fire from a safe distance. Greek mythology even suggests that Prometheus, who gave the gift of fire to humanity, may have carried it in a hollowed-out branch—perhaps one fashioned from elder.
European Elderberry
While Greco-Roman culture and influence waxed and waned, the centrality of elderberry as a useful medicine has endured right up until modern times. The peasant’s medicine chest had real staying power.
At the same time, elderberry became deeply entwined with local superstitions and religious scruples. Elder was sometimes viewed with suspicion and fear—one legend claimed Judas Iscariot hanged himself from an elder tree, likely a story invented to discourage tree worship, and old rhymes cast the ‘bour tree’ as crooked and cursed.
Shakespeare even put elder alongside great healers of antiquity in The Merry Wives of Windsor, with a character exclaiming, ‘What says my Aesculapius? My Galen? My heart of Elder?’—a glimpse of the esteem it enjoyed among ordinary people.
European records from the Middle Ages, such as those of German scholar Conrad von Megenberg (1309–1374), include what is likely the earliest written mention of using elderberry juice to increase resistance to illness.
By the 1600s, entire books were devoted to elder’s virtues. One standout is Martin Blochwich’s The Anatomy of the Elder (1644), which gathered reason, experience, and history into more than 250 pages of elder remedies—a testament to how highly this plant was regarded across Europe.
Elder was not just for the learned; it was truly “the medicine chest of the country people,” a phrase first credited to sixteenth-century physician Michael Ettmüller.
In England, Nicholas Culpeper’s popular herbals—along with works by authors such as Sauer—were go-to home-remedy books for over a century in parts of Europe and the United States, and he praised elderflowers for helping dropsy, “cleansing the blood,” and clearing the skin.
Elder was not only a home remedy, either; numerous everyday products were made from elder and elderberry, from non-alcoholic drinks to body-care preparations.
In 1835, Lydia Child’s The American Frugal Housewife echoed this view, noting that ‘Every part of it serves some useful purpose—the wood, pith, bark, leaves, buds, flowers, and fruit—from drink and medicine to insect repellent and plant protection.’
By the late 1800s, home medical manuals such as The Cottage Physician still recommended elder (especially the flowers) as a mild laxative and skin-active remedy, used for complaints ranging from rheumatism and gout to earaches, eye issues, and measles.
Historical cookbooks and winemaking guides from the 1400s onward nearly always included elderflower and elderberry wines, along with recipes for brandy, cordials, jams, jellies, and even elderberry soup.
Native and Early American Elderberry
Elderberry’s history in North America is not as well known but is no less rich than in Europe. Native American nations made use of elder far back into their histories, and archaeological work has found elder seeds at sites dating between about 1000 and 1300 BC.
For some Haudenosaunee and other peoples, small hollow elder shoots were cut, strung, and carried as physical pledges of good faith in diplomatic journeys—linking the plant with trustworthiness and honesty.
Many Native American uses of elder parallel those in Europe: the wood became musical instruments and hand tools; the flowers and berries went into beverages and even battered, fried clusters; and nearly every part of the plant served medicinally for fevers, purging, wounds, sores, and other skin ailments.
In some regions, dried elderberries were also mixed into pemmican—one of the earliest ‘on-the-go’ snack bars made from fat and finely pounded meat.
Colonists brought European cultivars with them, but quickly learned to work with native elder species that grew across the continent. It is hard to find a culinary or medicinal text from the first 150 years of US history that does not mention elder in some form.
During the Civil War, when conventional medicines grew scarce—especially in the South—both soldiers and physicians fell back on herbal lore, using elder alongside other native plants. Manuals from that period describe decoctions of elder leaves, flowers, or berries poured over wounds as washes to help protect against flies and infection.
Because of its deep color and flavor, elderberry was sometimes used to stretch or intensify wines and other drinks, and barkeepers and butlers were trained to recognize when it had been added.
More Than Medicine
While elderberry has a long, rich history of culinary and medicinal use, the plant was also prized for many other purposes.
The word ‘elder’ is thought to come from, or be related to, the old word aeld, meaning ‘fire’ or ‘wind’: early uses included hollow branches used as bellows for blowing air into a fire and for simple musical instruments. The Greek and Latin root sambu appears to have originally referred to a flute-like instrument made from elder wood.
Elderberry was often used as a dye for fabrics and was not limited to paints and clothing. It also works as a food dye for things like Easter eggs or cake frosting, and people used it as a hair dye, for complexion and skin, and as makeup; anyone who works with elder regularly quickly learns that, even if it does not heal everything it touches, it will almost certainly stain it.
Because of its beauty and growth habit, elderberry has been used in landscaping and homestead design for at least 2,000 years, with mentions going back to Greco-Roman times. It was one of the earliest plants used to create what we might now call living fences, with 17th-century writers recommending elder hedges as quick, effective shelters from wind and wandering animals.
Thanks to its mildly toxic components, people have long used elder for antifungal and natural pesticide purposes as well. Elder leaves were laid near the heads of bedridden patients to help keep away flies; its juice was sprayed on certain crops to deter pests, and similar preparations were used for livestock ailments, often mirroring human remedies.
In the mid-1900s, elderberry—like many traditional foods and herbal medicines—lost ground to the age of antibiotics. Over the past decade, though, interest in elder has surged, reaching a level not seen in a century.
Elder has been called the “people’s medicine chest” for good reason, and the more you work with it, the more that name makes sense.
Whether you are simmering berries into syrup, steeping flowers for tea, stirring them into honey, or tucking a tincture bottle into your winter toolkit, you are tapping into a plant that has been helping humans weather cold and flu season for thousands of years—and inviting it to take a small but meaningful place in your own family’s story.
Now that you are more familiar with elder’s story, let’s look at practical ways to make elderberry part of your own winter kitchen and cold-and-flu routine with these helpful recipes.
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John Moody is the founder of Whole Life Services and Whole Life Buying Club and the former executive director of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund.
He is the CEO of Steader and has spent more than a decade involved with farming, food, and homesteading, including running an elderberry syrup business. A well-known speaker at conferences such as Mother Earth News and Wise Traditions, he received the Weston A. Price Foundation’s 2013 Activist of the Year award and farms and homesteads with his wife and five children on 35 acres in Kentucky.
To order a copy of The Elderberry Book: Forage, Cultivate, Prepare, Preserve, visit: https://newsociety.com/ book/the-elderberry-book/
Well Being Journal adapted the above excerpt from The Elderberry Book: Forage, Cultivate, Prepare, Preserve by John Moody. Copyright © 2019 by John Moody, and reprinted with permission from New Society Publishers.
