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Thankyou for being here in my inner circle! Jo xx
Hello Wild Ones,
In September’s Newsletter I gave you a look in my foraging basket and talked about Nettle Seeds, Blackberries and Rosehips (click here to read if you missed it) and I spoke about waiting for the Elderberries to ripen. Well they are now ripe up here in Northumberland, and they have a short window for foraging, so I thought I would give you all the Elderberry low-down so that you can join in!
Elder - the abundant giver
I wrote about Elder earlier in the year in this post when the trees were flowering, and now we have moved around the wheel of the year from Midsummer to the Autumn Equinox, this magical tree is giving us a new gift. I think of these hedgerow beings as such benevolent, abundant and generous plant allies. Along with Dog Rose and Hawthorn, the Elders can be found all along the boundaries, in hedges, at the edges of woodlands and even in parks and urban ‘wastelands’, and these three plants just give and give. They produce flowers from spring through to summer, and then begin the fruiting of wonderful medicine-filled berries. It seems that as soon as the Hawthorn flowers have gone over, Elderflowers are there to pick up the blossoming, and Roses flower right through the Summer until the hips appear. What a stalwart trio native to our lands, and they are so resilient to being cut, humanly ‘managed’, and foraged! The more flowers you pick, the more flowers the plants produce, and as long as we are conscious and responsible foragers (leaving some flowers on each plant) then the berry harvest is abundant too.
Medicinal Berries
Elder - Sambucus nigra
The ‘nigra’ here in the Latin name refers to the almost-black berries. The clusters of fruits have undergone a beautiful transformation since Summer. The flower-umbels in June are big, upward-turning ‘plates’ of tiny flowers. After they’ve been pollinated, each tiny star flower forms into a little bead, a small green nub which swells and then starts to ripen. As they ripen they become heavier, and the whole clusters begin to droop downwards on the stalk. No longer the bright, upward-facing flowers suggesting their affinity for looking heavenwards, guiding intuition and connecting to our dreams…but now the dark, descending berries, mirroring their medicine of helping us look within, tend our bodies, and let go of what we no longer need.
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