Seeds and cuttings I collect around North Carolina, what they turned out to be, and how to grow them for a NC Piedmont native-plant nursery.
Sambucus canadensis · Viburnaceae (Adoxaceae)
Sunny wet edges on the Haw are hung with drooping purple-black berry plates right now, and the canes root from a stick in a bucket.
Community photos of Sambucus canadensis to study before I head out: leaf, flower or bract, ripe fruit, bark, whole plant.
Common statewide. NC State Extension says it "can be found in all areas of North Carolina along streams, marshes, moist forests, and disturbed areas," and Alamance County alone carries 83 iNaturalist records. The work is picking a good mother plant, not finding one
Best bet: Cuttings over seed. Come back in Feb–Mar and take dormant hardwood cuttings 2–4 nodes long from last season's canes off the plants I flagged; stick them in sterile mix with at least one node buried, and expect good rooting in 4–6 weeks (rooting hormone showed no significant benefit in trials, and shoots push before roots do). That clones a known heavy-fruiting Haw River genotype and skips elderberry's double seed dormancy. Run this trip's berries as the diversity backup: clean the seed and sow it outdoors in a protected seedbed immediately, so late-summer warmth then winter chill supply the warm-then-cold sequence for free.
About as easy as a NC Piedmont native gets. Hardy zones 4a–8b (Alamance is 7b/8a, dead center), tolerant of clay, loam or sand, happy in acid-to-neutral soil, thriving from full sun to part shade. Give it the moistest, sunniest ground on the property, a swale, a downspout outfall, a pond edge, because fruit set falls off in dry shade. Two things to plan for: it suckers hard and will knit into a solid hedge in two to three years, so site it where a thicket is the goal; and it fruits on second-year wood, so strip the flowers the first year, expect a light crop in year two and full production by years three to four. Fast and cheap from cuttings.
Each look-alike with the one character that settles it. Tap a photo to zoom.
The one that actually matters. Water hemlock never makes a berry. It is herbaceous, with alternate, twice-compound leaves and flat umbels of tiny white flowers that dry into ribbed seeds. No juicy fruit, ever. Its stem is smooth, hollow and purple-streaked rather than woody and warty, and its leaflet veins run to the notches between the teeth rather than the tooth tips. A drooping plate of purple-black berries on a woody cane with opposite leaves is not water hemlock. Confusion only happens in the white-flower season.
Fern-fine, finely dissected alternate leaves on a smooth hollow stem splashed with purple blotches, blooming spring into early summer and setting dry fruit. No berry, no woody warty cane. Crushed foliage smells rank and mousy; elderberry leaves smell green and faintly sour.
Dark purple berries on vivid magenta rays, same size, same habitat, same late-August timing. Three characters, any one of which settles it: stout prickles on the trunk, the petioles, even the leaf midribs, against elderberry's completely unarmed canes; leaves alternate and twice (bi)pinnately compound, up to a yard long, against elderberry's opposite once-compound leaves; and habit, one tall unbranched club of a stem carrying a huge upright pyramidal fruiting panicle at the very top, against a wide multi-stemmed shrub with drooping flat-topped plates at the branch tips. Grab a stem: prickles mean Aralia.
Simple, alternate leaves, not compound at all, and berries carried in a single long hanging raceme, one spike rather than a branched flat plate. Each pokeberry is flattened and ridged like a tiny pumpkin, on a smooth magenta stem. Elderberry's berries are round and its cluster branches repeatedly into a plate.
Wrong place and wrong season. A pyramidal, dome-shaped cluster of red fruit ripening in June–July over brown pith, against black elderberry's flat-topped plate of purple-black fruit over white pith in August. A NC mountain plant; it won't turn up on the Haw.
Both are honest opposite-and-compound confusions on a Piedmont floodplain, and both settle the same way: they are trees that make dry winged samaras, never berries. Ash adds tight diamond-ridged bark and leaflets that are entire to only shallowly toothed; boxelder has just 3–5 coarsely toothed-to-lobed leaflets on green twigs. Neither has a warty lenticel-studded cane over a thick white pith.
Weakley's Flora of the Southeastern US, the flora this project defers to, calls it Sambucus canadensis, and that's the name used here. USDA PLANTS, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and US Fish & Wildlife write Sambucus nigra ssp. canadensis instead, following Bolli's 1994 treatment lumping the American plant into the European black elder as a subspecies. Two camps on rank, same plant. Family is likewise in motion: older books say Caprifoliaceae, recent ones Adoxaceae, current floras Viburnaceae.
Elderberry is a sun-and-water plant, and that single fact does most of the searching. Not the shaded interior of the floodplain forest. The edge: where the trail opens to the river, where the mill race runs, where a ditch or seep keeps the ground damp, where a powerline cut or old field breaks the canopy. Arching multi-stemmed thickets, usually wider than tall, 5–12 ft, canes leaning out over the water or the trail.
Right now, look for the fruit plate. A broad, flat-topped, repeatedly branched cluster 4–10 inches across, hanging face-down and nodding under hundreds of ¼-inch glossy purple-black berries, on rays flushed from green to bright red-purple. That red-and-black combination against pale-backed compound leaves reads from thirty yards on a river bank.
Timing is the point of this trip. Of iNaturalist's annotated North Carolina observations, fruiting runs July (35), August (38), September (19), October (0). Flowering peaked back in May–June. This is the top of the curve and it falls off fast, partly because the fruit finishes and partly because catbirds, robins and cedar waxwings clean a bush out in days once it goes fully black. This week, not next month.
Read this section before eating anything. Elderberry has one genuinely lethal look-alike, and the separating character is trivial.
On toxicity: leaves, stems, roots and unripe fruit contain cyanogenic glycosides. NC Extension lists nausea, vomiting and diarrhea for ingestion, unripe fruit worse than ripe. Handling is fine; strip clusters bare-handed all day. Cooking inactivates the compound, which is why every traditional use is a cooked one. Don't graze raw handfuls and don't throw green berries in the pot.
Cut whole cymes at the base of the cluster stalk when roughly 80–90% of the berries have gone glossy purple-black, the rays have flushed red-purple, and the plate nods under its own weight. A cluster still mostly green or red isn't finished. Carry clusters loose and cool, since packed warm in a bag they ferment within hours.
Second job on the same trip: flag the mothers. Two or three plants bearing heavily, clean unspotted foliage, somewhere I can legally and easily return in winter. Flagging tape and a pin. Those flags are worth more than the berries.
Cleaning. Mash the berries in a bucket of water and let the mash sit a couple of days to break down the pulp, or macerate and rinse straight away. Pulp, skins and empty seed float; good seed sinks. Decant, repeat until the water runs clear. What's left is clean grit-sized stones, 3–5 per berry, so a few clusters yield hundreds.
Seed dormancy is double: a hard, water-resistant coat and a dormant embryo. Published work found a 60-day warm moist treatment followed by 90 days cold moist stratification significantly raised germination, as did sulfuric acid scarification (10–20 min) followed by ~60 days cold. Even then germination is erratic and spread across more than one spring. The dodge is to sow cleaned seed outdoors immediately, late August or September, in a protected seedbed or a covered flat sunk in the ground: remaining late-summer warmth gives the warm phase, winter gives the chill, in the right order. Expect a scatter of seedlings next spring and more the spring after. Screen against rodents; don't let it dry out.
Cuttings are the better nursery route. Elderberry roots like a weed, which is why nobody in production grows it from seed.
Hardwood cuttings clone a genotype I've watched fruit heavily and need no mist bench; the seed is the genetic-diversity backup.
Grow-out: fruits on second-year wood. Pinch off flowers the first year to build roots, light crop in year two, full production in years three to four. It suckers into a solid hedge within two to three years, so space accordingly.
Haw River Trail at Saxapahaw, hunting the openings rather than the woods. Best ground:
Farther along the corridor if Saxapahaw is picked over: Swepsonville River Park upstream, Shallow Ford Natural Area, Great Bend Park at Glencoe, all Alamance County sections of the Haw River Trail with the same sunny-wet-edge structure.
One trail-side discipline: I'll be walking past devil's walking stick carrying an almost identical magenta-and-purple fruit head at the same time of year. Before cutting a cluster, put a hand on the stem. Prickles and alternate twice-compound leaves mean Aralia. Smooth warty canes and opposite once-compound leaves mean elderberry.