Elderberry: History and Traditional Use

Few hedgerow plants have kept human company as long, or as closely, as the elder. The black-berried European elder, Sambucus nigra, has fed people, dosed their fevers, dyed their cloth, lit their lamps, and haunted their folklore for thousands of years — long before anyone could name a single molecule inside it. This page traces that long story as honestly as the records allow. Where the evidence is solid — an archaeological seed, a named clinical trial, a chemical fact — it is stated plainly. Where a claim is really tradition, folklore, or a tale repeated so often it reads as fact, it is named as such. The one constant across every culture and century is simple: long before science arrived, ordinary people noticed that this common little tree seemed to help, and they wove it deep into both their medicine and their imagination.

Table of Contents

  1. The Elder Tree and Its Names
  2. Ancient Roots: Stone Age to Classical Antiquity
  3. Medieval Europe and the “Medicine Chest of the Country People”
  4. The Elder Mother and the Folklore of the Tree
  5. Herbalists of the 1600s and 1700s
  6. North America: Native Use and the Settler Tradition
  7. Food, Drink, and the Cooked-Berry Rule
  8. The Modern Revival: From Folk Syrup to Clinical Trial
  9. References
  10. Connections
  11. Featured Videos

The Elder Tree and Its Names

Elderberry is the common English name for the fruit of the elder, a small deciduous tree or large shrub of the genus Sambucus. The species at the centre of the European and modern supplement tradition is the black elder, Sambucus nigra L., native to Europe, North Africa, and western Asia. It is a familiar plant of hedgerows, woodland edges, riverbanks, and waste ground — the kind of tree that grows almost anywhere soil has been disturbed, which is a large part of why so many cultures came to know it. In late spring it carries broad, flat heads of creamy, fragrant flowers; by late summer those become drooping clusters of small, glossy, purple-black berries.

The name “elder” does not refer to age. It descends from the Old English ell(a)rn or eld, and a common explanation traces it to the Anglo-Saxon root aeld, meaning fire — because the tree’s straight young stems have a soft, easily removed pith, and a hollowed elder stem made a natural blowpipe or bellows for coaxing a flame. Those same hollow stems were also used to make simple pipes, flutes, and pea-shooters, and the botanical name Sambucus is often linked to the Greek sambuke, an ancient stringed or wind instrument. The reading is debated, but the link between the elder and its hollow, music-making, fire-tending stems is old and persistent.

This combination of traits — abundant, easy to recognise, useful in every part, and growing right at the edge of human settlement — is why the elder appears so early and so widely in the human record, and why it accumulated such a thick layer of practical use and folklore. The sections that follow trace that record from its prehistoric beginnings to the modern laboratory.

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Ancient Roots: Stone Age to Classical Antiquity

The elder’s association with people is genuinely prehistoric. Archaeobotanists working at European Neolithic and Bronze Age sites — including the famous waterlogged lake-dwelling settlements of the Alpine region, where organic material survives unusually well — have recovered Sambucus seeds in contexts tied to human activity. The fruit was within reach of Stone Age and Bronze Age communities, and the recovered remains indicate it was among the wild plants they gathered. This places the elder among humanity’s oldest known food and useful plants, even if we cannot say exactly how those early people prepared or valued it.

By classical antiquity the elder had a documented place in written medicine. The plant is discussed in the foundational texts of Greek and Roman pharmacy: the Greek physician Dioscorides described Sambucus in his first-century De Materia Medica, and the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder catalogued the elder among the medicinal plants of his vast Natural History, also from the first century CE. These works recorded uses of the berries, leaves, bark, and root for a range of complaints. They are named here as historical primary sources rather than as modern citations, but they mark the point at which elder use passes from the archaeological record into the written tradition that Europe would build on for the next sixteen centuries.

One line is repeated in almost every popular account of the herb: that Hippocrates, the Greek “father of medicine,” called the elder his “medicine chest.” It is a memorable phrase and it captures something true about how broadly the plant was used — but it is best treated as a well-worn traditional attribution rather than a verbatim, sourced quotation, since it is difficult to tie to a specific surviving Hippocratic text. What is solid is that the three great names of ancient Mediterranean medicine — the Hippocratic tradition, Dioscorides, and Pliny — all engaged with the elder, and that the plant therefore stood inside the Western medical canon from its earliest written days. An ancient Egyptian use of elder preparations to improve the complexion and treat burns is also widely repeated, and elder is sometimes linked to the Ebers Papyrus; treat this as traditional lore, as the primary evidence is less secure than the classical Greek and Roman record.

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Medieval Europe and the “Medicine Chest of the Country People”

It was in medieval and early-modern Europe that the elder earned its enduring reputation as the poor household’s entire pharmacy — the plant later writers nicknamed the “medicine chest of the country people.” The reason was practical. Elder grew free and everywhere, and country families used every part of it. The flowers were made into teas, waters, and ointments for fevers, coughs, colds, and skin complaints; the ripe berries, cooked, were taken for chest troubles, fevers, and as a gentle laxative, and were brewed into wine and cordials; the bark and root were used as strong purgatives and diuretics; and the leaves went into green ointments and poultices for bruises, sprains, and inflamed skin. A tree that supplied a remedy for nearly every common ailment, at no cost, was worth knowing intimately.

This is also the period in which the elder picked up its darker reputation. As the historical overview by Salamon and Grulova summarises in its very title, the elder travelled “from natural medicine in ancient times to protection against witches in the Middle Ages.” The tree sat on a cultural boundary: prized as a healer and a protector, yet also feared and bound up with witchcraft and the dead. That ambivalence — the same plant seen as both a charm against evil and a tree to be wary of — runs straight through the European folklore examined in the next section. For most people, though, the day-to-day reality of the elder was simply that it was the most useful medicinal tree within walking distance of the door.

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The Elder Mother and the Folklore of the Tree

No account of the elder is complete without its folklore, because few plants carried so heavy a load of belief. Across northern Europe — and especially in Danish, German, and Scandinavian tradition — the tree was held to be inhabited by a guardian spirit. In Danish folklore she is the Hyldemoer, the “Elder Mother” (from hyld, the elder, and moer, mother), a maternal presence living within the wood who protected the tree and could avenge harm done to it. The English-language counterpart is usually called the Elder Mother. This was no idle story: it governed how people actually handled the plant.

The most widely recorded custom is the request for permission. Before cutting elder wood or gathering its flowers or berries, country people are recorded as formally asking the spirit’s leave — reciting a small rhyme or prayer to the Hyldemoer, sometimes pouring an offering of milk on the roots, or calling to her three times before taking a single branch. To cut elder carelessly, without asking, was thought to bring misfortune, illness, or the Elder Mother’s anger down on the cutter. Folklore also warned against burning elder wood on the household hearth and against making a baby’s cradle from it, for fear of the harm that might follow. These beliefs are documented folk customs — cultural history, not instructions — but they tell us how deeply the tree was respected.

Alongside this fear ran a strong protective tradition. Elder was planted by the house and the dairy, hung over doorways, and carried to guard against evil spirits, lightning, and ill luck. The branches and the strong-smelling leaves were used to repel insects and were hung in barns and stables to protect livestock. So the elder occupied a striking double role in the European imagination: a tree to be approached with courtesy and even caution, and at the same time a powerful charm of protection for home, family, and herd. That this much belief gathered around one common hedgerow tree is itself a measure of how central the elder was to everyday life.

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Herbalists of the 1600s and 1700s

As European herbal medicine moved into print, the elder was given long and admiring entries. The most famous single tribute comes from the English diarist and writer John Evelyn, whose 1664 work Sylva (a discourse on forest trees, presented to the Royal Society) praised the elder in sweeping terms, describing it — in the period’s spelling — as “a kind of Catholicon against all Infirmities whatever.” A “catholicon” meant a universal remedy or cure-all, and the quotation is repeatedly and reliably attributed to Evelyn; it neatly captures the high regard in which the educated of his day held the tree. It is, of course, the enthusiasm of its time, not a medical claim that elder cures everything.

The elder also features in the most widely read English herbal of all, Nicholas Culpeper’s The English Physician (often known as the Complete Herbal, 1652), which set out the traditional uses of the flowers, berries, bark, and leaves for dropsy, fevers, skin troubles, and inflammation within Culpeper’s astrological framework. Earlier, John Gerard’s Herball of 1597 had likewise described the plant. Across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, dedicated treatises on the elder appeared in continental Europe as well, cataloguing dozens of preparations from a single tree. These herbals are named here as historical texts. What they collectively record is consistent: a plant valued chiefly for fevers, coughs and colds, skin complaints, and as a purgative and diuretic — the same broad pattern of use seen from the Middle Ages onward, now written down in detail.

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North America: Native Use and the Settler Tradition

North America has its own elders. The American elder, Sambucus canadensis (often treated as closely related to or a subspecies of S. nigra), grows across eastern and central North America, and the blue elder, Sambucus cerulea (also written S. caerulea), grows in the west. A substantial ethnobotanical record documents that many Native American nations used these native elders. Recorded uses include the cooked berries as food and the flowers, berries, inner bark, and root in preparations for fevers, coughs and colds, swellings, and inflammation, with strong bark and root preparations used as purgatives and emetics. As in Europe, the harsher plant parts were handled as potent medicine rather than casual food. These are historical ethnobotanical records describing past and traditional practice, not modern clinical recommendations.

European settlers carried their own elder traditions across the Atlantic and found familiar-looking elders already growing and already in use, so the European and Native streams of knowledge met and mingled in American folk medicine. Elder flower water, elderberry wine and syrup, and elder-flower salves became fixtures of colonial and later American home medicine, and elder remained a standard remedy in nineteenth-century domestic and botanical practice. From this blended folk tradition the elderberry passed, largely intact, into the twentieth century — ready for the scientific revival described below.

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Food, Drink, and the Cooked-Berry Rule

Long before it was a supplement, the elder was food and drink. The flowers have been battered and fried into fritters, steeped into a fragrant cordial, and fermented into sparkling “elderflower champagne”; the cooked berries have been made into wine, jam, jelly, syrup, pie, ketchup, and a winter cordial in countless regional recipes across Europe. This culinary tradition matters to the herb’s history because it is inseparable from one crucial piece of practical knowledge that every elder-using culture learned: the berries must be cooked.

Raw or unripe elderberries — and the leaves, stems, bark, and roots of the tree — contain cyanogenic glycosides, chiefly sambunigrin and prunasin, which can release small amounts of cyanide and cause nausea, vomiting, and diarrhoea if eaten raw in quantity. The U.S. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health states plainly that “raw or unripe elderberries and other parts of the elder tree, such as the leaves and stem, contain poisonous cyanide-producing substances” and that “cooking eliminates this toxin.” Heat breaks these compounds down, which is exactly why the entire traditional and commercial use of the berry runs through cooking — the simmered syrup, the boiled wine, the baked pie. The folk practice of always cooking elderberries was, in effect, correct food-safety science arrived at by long experience, centuries before the chemistry was understood. It remains the single most important practical rule for anyone using the fruit today.

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The Modern Revival: From Folk Syrup to Clinical Trial

For most of the twentieth century the elderberry was a quaint folk remedy and a country wine. Its modern scientific revival is usually traced to the early 1990s and a research group at the Hebrew University–Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, where the virologist Madeleine Mumcuoglu developed a standardised black-elderberry extract (later marketed as Sambucol). The pivotal early publication was a 1995 study led by Zichria Zakay-Rones, with Mumcuoglu among the authors, reporting that the elderberry extract inhibited several strains of influenza virus in the laboratory and reduced symptoms in people during an outbreak of influenza B in an Israeli community. This was the work that put elderberry back on the scientific map and launched the wave of research and commercial products that followed.

A second, often-cited trial by Zakay-Rones and colleagues, published in 2004 and conducted during the 1999–2000 influenza season in Norway, was a small randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled study of elderberry syrup in influenza A and B. It reported that symptoms were relieved on average about four days earlier in the elderberry group than in the placebo group. Later work extended the picture: a 2016 randomised placebo-controlled trial in air travellers found that elderberry supplementation modestly shortened the duration and reduced the symptoms of colds, and a 2019 meta-analysis by Hawkins and colleagues, pooling several randomised trials, concluded that standardised elderberry extract reduced the overall duration and severity of upper-respiratory symptoms. It is worth being clear-eyed about all this: these were mostly small studies, several were industry-linked, and authorities such as NCCIH stress that the overall evidence remains limited rather than definitive. Elderberry is a promising supportive remedy for the misery of colds and flu — not a proven cure, and never a substitute for vaccination or for medical care when an illness is serious.

What makes the elderberry’s story satisfying is its long arc. A tree gathered in the Stone Age, written up by Dioscorides and Pliny, feared and revered as the home of the Elder Mother, praised by John Evelyn as a near-universal remedy, cooked into syrup in a thousand kitchens, and finally carried into a modern laboratory where its old reputation as a cold-and-flu medicine is being tested under controlled conditions. Tradition raised the question; research is now, carefully and incompletely, trying to answer it. The detailed evidence behind elderberry’s immune, antiviral, antioxidant, and cardiovascular uses — together with forms, dosing, and safety — is taken up in the companion Elderberry Benefits articles and on the main Elderberry page.

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References

The list below combines key peer-reviewed publications on Sambucus nigra with curated PubMed topic-search links into the historical, ethnobotanical, and clinical literature. Historical primary texts (Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica, Pliny’s Natural History, Gerard’s and Culpeper’s herbals, and John Evelyn’s Sylva) are named in the article as historical sources rather than as modern citations. Author names, titles, and journals are given as plain text; only stable identifiers (DOI, PMID, or archival URLs) are linked, and each opens in a new tab.

  1. Salamon I, Grulova D. Elderberry (Sambucus nigra): from natural medicine in ancient times to protection against witches in the Middle Ages – a brief historical overview. Acta Horticulturae. 2015;1061:35–39. — doi:10.17660/ActaHortic.2015.1061.2
  2. Zakay-Rones Z, Varsano N, Zlotnik M, Manor O, Regev L, Schlesinger M, Mumcuoglu M. Inhibition of several strains of influenza virus in vitro and reduction of symptoms by an elderberry extract (Sambucus nigra L.) during an outbreak of influenza B Panama. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. 1995;1(4):361–369. — PMID: 9395631
  3. Zakay-Rones Z, Thom E, Wollan T, Wadstein J. Randomized study of the efficacy and safety of oral elderberry extract in the treatment of influenza A and B virus infections. Journal of International Medical Research. 2004;32(2):132–140. — doi:10.1177/147323000403200205
  4. Tiralongo E, Wee SS, Lea RA. Elderberry supplementation reduces cold duration and symptoms in air-travellers: a randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial. Nutrients. 2016;8(4):182. — doi:10.3390/nu8040182
  5. Hawkins J, Baker C, Cherry L, Dunne E. Black elderberry (Sambucus nigra) supplementation effectively treats upper respiratory symptoms: a meta-analysis of randomized, controlled clinical trials. Complementary Therapies in Medicine. 2019;42:361–365. — doi:10.1016/j.ctim.2018.12.004
  6. Mocan A, et al. Bioactive compounds, antioxidant capacity and traditional uses of Sambucus nigra (review). — PubMed: Sambucus nigra ethnobotany and history
  7. Sambucus ethnobotany and Native American use — PubMed: Sambucus Native American ethnobotany
  8. Elderberry cyanogenic glycosides (sambunigrin, prunasin) and the effect of cooking — PubMed: elderberry cyanogenic glycosides and processing
  9. Elderberry clinical trials for influenza and the common cold — PubMed: elderberry influenza and cold trials

External Authoritative Resources

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Connections

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