Elderflower
I bought a secondhand book on the subject of herbs the other day. Nothing unusual, l love secondhand books, but this one weighs more than a brick; it is huge! Titled ‘A Modern Herbal’, it was first published in 1931 and is by a Mrs. M. Grieve. It covers “grasses, fungi, shrubs and trees with all the modern uses”. It has half a page for almost every plant I can think of and eight pages on the elder.
On a sunny-but-cool day, I decide to head out and draw an elder tree located on the bank of a modest river in a nearby park. The elder is a small tree, and the leaf buds look like tiny pineapples with purple heads. Elder flowers grow in great white bunches around May-time. They are terribly difficult to draw, but worth the effort, and really very pretty when you look closely.
This month, I am looking into elderflower concoctions. Mrs Grieve writes that the elder has long been described as the “natural medicine chest” because of its many and varied uses. For now, though, my intention is to experiment solely with the flowers and to leave the rest of the tree – potions can be made from nearly all of its constituent parts – until the berries emerge, closer to the autumn.
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