A year of flowers #51: Blue elderberry

 

Sambucus nigra

I have planted four Blue elderberry shrubs in the prairie, but the birds have planted three, including this 20-foot-tall monster example that was the first one I had out there.  It came out of nowhere, and Jim Roberts (my neighbor and native plant sensei) properly identified it for me. 

They have an interesting growth habit that you can see in this photo, that they are always putting on new growth, and the old growth sort of dies off and sits there.  Of course the berries had all sorts of uses, but these dead elderberry stalks were also important to Native Americans.  When I first came here in 1990 and started teaching in the WSU music department, there was a professor there, Loran Olsen, who had been a pianist in his earlier career, but over the years had first befriended, then was accepted by the local Nez Perce as someone who respected and tried to support and encourage traditional arts.  He was teaching a course in Native American music and, because I had no education whatsoever in this heritage, I audited his course so I could learn more.  After Dr. Olsen retired, the course was taken over by Dr. Ron Pond, a Umatilla/Palootspu shaman with whom I shared an office off-and-on for many years.  He was the real deal, and I felt fortunate to have learned a great deal from him as well.

Among the Nez Perce, flutes are made from hollowed-out Blue elderberry stalks.  They have a hard outside and a soft inside that you can push out with a harder stick or other tool and make a tube.  You make a fipple with pine tar (or chewing gum--Dr. Olsen's idea for making them with his Native American music class), and then you adjust the hole above the fipple, to make a sound by wrapping it with sinew.  

When a plant gets some age on it, there are often these dead stalks that have been hollowed out by wind and weather sticking out from the plant, and they can whistle in the wind.  The Nez Perce believe that the Great Spirit brought them music and taught them how to make flutes, by making the elderberry stalks sing in the wind.