ELDER, the popular designation of the deciduous shrubs and trees constituting the genus Sambucus of the family Capri foliaceae. The common elder, S. nigra, is found in Europe, north Africa, western Asia, the Caucasus and -southern Siberia ; in sheltered spots it attains a height of over 20 ft. The bark is smooth ; the shoots are stout and angular, and the leaves glabrous, pinnate, with oval or elliptical leaflets. The flowers, which form dense flat-topped clusters (corymbose cymes), with five main branches, have a cream-coloured, gamopetalous, five-lobed corolla, five stamens and three sessile stigmas ; the berries are purplish black, globular and three- or four-seeded, and ripen about Septem ber. The elder thrives best in moist, well-drained situations, but can be grown in a great diversity of soils. It is found useful for making screen-fences in bleak, exposed situations, and also as a shelter for other shrubs in the outskirts of plantations. By clip ping two or three times a year, it may be made close and compact in growth. The young trees furnish a brittle wood, containing much pith; the wood of old trees is white, hard and close grained, polishes well, and is employed for shoemakers' pegs, combs, skewers, mathematical instruments and turned articles. Young elder twigs deprived of pith have from early times been in request for making whistles, pop guns and other toys.
Several varieties of S. nigra are known in cultivation : aurea, golden elder, has golden-yellow leaves; laciniata, parsley-leaved elder, has the leaflets cut into fine segments; rotundifolia has rounded leaflets; forms also oc cur with variegated white and yellow leaves, and virescens is a variety having white bark and green-coloured berries.
The elder was known to the ancients for its medicinal erties, and in England the inner bark was formerly adrministered as a cathartic. The flowers tain a volatile oil, and serve for the distillation of elder-flower water, used in confectionery, fumes and lotions. The leaves are employed to impart a green colour to fat and oil, and the ries for making wine, a common adulterant of port. The leaves and bark emit a sickly odour, lieved to be repugnant to insects. According to German folklore, the hat must be doffed in the presence of the elder-tree ; and in certain of the English midland counties a belief was once prevalent that the cross of Christ was made from its wood. It was, however, a common mediaeval tradition that the elder was the tree on which Judas hanged himself. In Denmark the tree was supposed by the superstitious to be under the protection of the mother": its flowers may not be gathered without her leave; its wood must not be employed for any household furniture; and a child sleeping in an elder-wood cradle would certainly be strangled by the Elder-mother.
Besides the red-berried elder, found in rocky soil from New foundland to Alaska and southward to Georgia and California, several other species are native to North America. The best known of these is the American or sweet elder (S. canadensis), common in moist soil from Nova Scotia to Manitoba and south to Florida, Texas and the West Indies, with deep-purple or black edible fruit. The blue elder (S. glauca or S. caerulea), found from British Columbia to Montana south to Lower California and New Mexico, usually a thicket bush 6 ft. to 1 o ft. but sometimes a tree 25 ft. high, bears blue fruit covered with a white bloom.