Pocahontas… it was found in Pocahontas Arkansas Z7B
Out yields Bob Gordon etc in some plantings.
Wyldewood is another good one for more southern growers… wild find in Oklahoma… Grown in Oklahoma Texas etc…
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first elders i tried to grow here were bob gordon and wyldewood. grew fantastic but berries never ripened before frost. was a bitch to get rid of them.
We just have tons of wild elderberry around here, but most of it is in heavy shade. So I wanted to snip some branches to try to get some larger cuttings. Usually (and what I did today) is I find the small suckers around the base and use those to propagate. Just wondering if I could use cuttings as well.
You should be able to take a cutting when dormant, dig a hole and plant the stick and get it to root over winter.
The 2 that I got when I planted them had been propagated that way. I planted a johns and an Adam.
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@sharq , this past spring I received about 20 dormant hardwood cuttings of several varieties of elder. While it was still cold outside (March in Michigan) I potted the cuttings up in 5 gallon buckets and left them outside. By mid June all but 1 of them had top growth and most had a nice cluster of roots.
I just got some more cuttings a week ago, these ones I will directly plant outside this week and mulch heavily. They seem to root easy.
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Elderberry can be propagated by just one node… so very easy to root.
This is probably the safest best bet for success.
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i scratch to the cambium near the bottom. near 100% takes that way. if i wanted to plant a whole orchard of them, i would just buy a bunch of cuttings. i have 4 marge’s that should fruit for me for the 1st. time this summer. all from cuttings i bought off Esty for less than .50 per cutting. all took. went from a cutting to a 5ft. bush in 1 summer. supposed to be super productive with huge berries.
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Can you graft different elderberry species (like the red or blue berry elders or the ones with the burgundy foliage) to sambucus nigra subsp. canadensis (which is our native elderberry)? I have about 50 elderberries that I got from root suckers (and have probably 50 more to pull up) and wanted to know if they be good rootstock for other varieties. Or is it not really worth it to graft elderberries?
Help ID this elderberry?
I have an unknown elderberry (which could be a named variety or a seedling) that acts differently than my others. In the winter (mild PNW zone 7b winter) it loses most, but usually not all, of it’s leaves, and starts growing tons of new ones long when the others are just starting to swell their buds. It also flowers very early; in the picture below taken March 1, you can see a flower-bud cluster forming. It doesn’t seem especially bothered by late frost etc. For reference, early February had about two weeks of snow cover, nighttime temps -6 to -3 C (~21 to 27 F) and daytime temps of -1 to +3 C (~30 to 37 F). The few remaining leaves from 2024 looked pretty sad during this time, but did not drop, and seem mostly fine now.
Is this an example of increased cold hardiness (growing in the cold) or decreased cold hardiness (not prepping itself properly for winter?) I haven’t really had any of my elderberries long enough to do a comparison of the fruit. The flower clusters seemed somewhat small in past years, but it is a young plant and it’s in nearly total shade.
If this sounds similar to a named variety anyone knows of, please let tell me! I would really like to know at least if it’s an American or European elderberry… any tips for telling the difference?
-Stephanie
seeing how easy they are to root i wouldnt bother grafting.
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hard to tell from the leaves as they all look very similar. what color are the berries? if black it could be either eastern American or euro. elder. blue is western elder. red is found in eastern and western n. america.
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It’s definitely a black-fruiting elderberry, although it’s possible that it’s a blue elderberry that didn’t get the “bloom” that makes them look blue since it’s only had one fruiting year so far to observe. I think the berries were held upright, although there weren’t many and I left them to the birds. The very early growth and flowering seem to be the distinguishing feature of this plant. Bob Gordon planted maybe six or eight feet away just has a few green buds swelling.
I wouldn’t. It’s not like it’ll be especially tasty with such tiny roots and few leaves to power it
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If there were only like five or six small green fruit on an entire cyme of flowers, and the others weren’t flowering yet, it probably didn’t get cross pollinated.
Are all the plants getting the same amounts of sun?
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There were maybe fifteen or twenty properly ripened berries on the largest bunch, the best I can remember. I think there were also a number of small green unripe fruits. It is maybe possible that the plant re-flowered later in the season, and the berries could have set then, but it could also be the flowers held on a long time or that it’s semi self-fertile.
My Bob Gordon is planted very close to my mystery elder, but in better soil and slightly more sunlight in summer, though both are equally in full shade right now. My Black Lace and York are in another location with better light but worse soil. None of the others are nearly so advanced as the mystery elder, just swollen leaf buds and a few new shoots here and there. All the plants are pretty young and the mystery elder was the only one to set any fruit last year.
Some other varieties that may interest some-
Fryeburg (native to Maine?)
Goodbarn (supposedly created by Elwyn Meader)
East Grove (from Eastern Iowa)
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Grafting elders would be a bit weird since they do most of their growing by pushing up new canes, which would come from the rootstock. As others have said, it’s super-easy to root cuttings.
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They put out crazy roots. They seem to want to root. So just cut a stick and put it in the ground in the fall once it’s dormant, boom new plant.
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