For commercial production, you can bet on the American elder ‘Bob Gordon’ (Sambucus canadensis), the star that gets the highest scores, and by far! The Bobby Gold of fruit production, with larger and sweeter fruits than average (‘Scotia‘ is sweeter). Its drooping corymbs, inverted compared to the usual, maximize the harvest by complicating access for birds.

With its extremely fast growth, it can help you in your search for privacy. Its flowers, sweetly perfumed, are refreshing in cold drinks, stimulating in infusion helping to reduce fever, and, with their corymb structure soaked in frying batter, make excellent fritters.

It offers purplish black fruity bouquets reminiscent of blueberry, blackberry and blackcurrant. However, wait until they are very dark, because immature fruits are toxic. It is advisable to cook them to eliminate any residual toxicity when ripe, which is recognized as being very low if detectable. Only birds seem to appreciate it fresh. Like tiny raisins, dehydration concentrates the sugars of the small berries, which are not very sweet by nature, but easy to dry, like flowers. Add color and vitamin C to your bread mixes, cakes, muffins, or your morning cereals, whose milk will take on a purple hue, attesting to its rich content of antioxidant anthocyanin pigments, almost abusively exceeding all records, making blueberries pale… Their transformation into pies and jams remains classic and the excellent country wine that it produces does not disconcert the sommelier, with a color and notes that play in the register of grape wines. The umbels ripen almost simultaneously. Two passes and a few quick snips of the scissors are enough to fill bags and bags with them.

The American elder ‘Bob Gordon’ can form clumps in partial shade, where it spreads suckering at the edge of a wood, on the edge of a nourishing forest, bringing privacy to your summer sanctuary. It grows in poor, acidic, heavy or light soil and does not fear strong winds or polluted air. With surface roots, it often seeks humidity, along streams, or in regulated riparian strips. If you prefer to keep the harvest within reach in a compact shrub, do not hesitate to cut back its branches in winter since it fruits on first-year stems. Partially self-fruitful. Native.