I was in a Walgreens browsing the supplements aisle, as I am wont to do, loitering among the zinc lozenges and nasal sprays. It was a late fall night in 2017: The flu season that year was especially severe — a scarily virulent strain, the news kept warning — and would end up being one of the deadliest on record. I was alone in Las Vegas, teaching college journalism and reporting on the mass shooting that had happened there a mere six weeks before. It was one of the bleaker and more arduous periods of my life. Everything felt dull and pedestrian, devoid of those occasional glimpses of sparkle and magic that keep one trudging on. In the evenings, after grading papers in my ugly carpeted apartment, I’d inevitably grow bored of the cable television offerings and decide to entertain myself by roaming around the forlorn Walgreens across the street from my apartment complex.

It was there, at the most depressing Walgreens in existence — I once saw a man buy 11 boxes of Raisin Bran, 9 tins of Nesquik, and a flat of Rockstar energy drinks to wash it all down with — that I first encountered elderberry syrup. My students, who were universally traumatized and beleaguered having just experienced a mass casualty event in their city, often came to class coughing and sneezing all over the place. I am prone to respiratory infections, so this did not thrill me. I was in search of immune support. As I scanned the tubes of Airborne and pouches of Ricola, I spotted a small purple and white box. “Black Elderberry” the label read, above an image of a bunch of round, inky-purple berries. “Scientifically Tested,” it added in small white script, “Supports Immunity.”

At the time, I knew nothing about elderberries. Thanks to Monty Python and the Holy Grail (“Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!”), I had a sense they were vaguely medieval and British. I also remembered my husband telling me that when he’d get a cough while studying at Oxford in the early 80s, where he’d spend winters shivering next to an electric-grate heater as tiny as a toaster in one corner of his dorm room, friends would recommend elderberry. The British believe in its curative powers as firmly as they hold that a cup of tea solves everything. My husband, however, was convinced that a syrup made from berries would be about as effective as Vegemite. Elderberry seemed to him like a tonic from The Hobbit, a druid potion or leprechaun remedy. “Have you heard about fucking NyQuil?” he wanted to say.

America doesn’t have a folk-remedy tradition quite like that of England or other older countries. We generally believe in science, technology, progress, Neosporin, Tylenol, Band-Aids. But in that flu-filled fall and winter of 2017–2018, science was converging on folk medicine — or, perhaps more accurately, catching up to it — as Tamiflu shortages led people to try natural supplements like elderberry. Since the late 90s, elderberry had been proving itself in clinical trials to be an effective treatment for the sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, stuffy head, fever symptoms of cold and flu. In one randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study, conducted during the 1999–2000 influenza season in Norway and published in The Journal of International Medical Research in 2004, 60 patients ranging in age from 18 to 54 received 15 ml of elderberry syrup four times a day for five days, and were relieved of their symptoms four days earlier, on average, than those given a placebo. Four days! Nearly an entire workweek. In another study, this one published in Nutrients in 2016, 312 economy-class passengers traveling overseas from Australia were given elderberry extract and asked to complete three surveys “regarding upper respiratory symptoms and quality of life” before and after travel. Those taking elderberry experienced colds that were two days shorter, plus a reduction in symptoms. Who wouldn’t want that?

In the wake of that grim flu season, and increasingly so in recent years as people have lost faith in pharmaceuticals and the American medical system built on them, elderberry has become wildly popular, even mainstream. It’s the herbal equivalent of Van Gogh — the one modern painter that people who don’t like modern art are reliably fond of. Taste-wise, it’s at once tart and sweet, like ultra-concentrated grape juice. It’s also safe, even for children, as there are almost zero side effects associated with it. Finally, it’s readily available: You can go to an old-school health food store and buy an elderberry elixir made by a home-based small business and sold in twee mason jars, or you can buy a big corporate-brand elderberry at Target or CVS. (It might contain some sugar or preservatives, but it’s fine.) According to a market report put out by the American Botanical Council, in 2021 alone, elderberry sales totaled $305 million.

Elderberries have a long, storied history as an important and celebrated folk medicine. For centuries, the sprawling, rather elegant elder shrub has been revered, feared, and its mysterious dark berries and pale, lacelike flowers employed for medicinal and culinary purposes. The British poet and naturalist Geoffrey Grigson theorized that the plants, which are native to Europe, Asia, and North America, were deposited by retreating glaciers around 9000 BCE. Elderberry seeds have been found in pile dwellings, or stilt houses, built in and around the Alps during the Neolithic era, suggesting that the plant was in cultivation as far back as 2000 BCE. 

Although there are ten known species of elderberries, when talking about the edible fruit with therapeutic properties, we are almost always talking about Sambucus nigra, or European black elder, and Sambucus canadensis, aka American elderberry, or common elderberry. While the European black elder has the contours of a tree and can grow as tall as 20 feet high, the American elderberry is squat, shrub-like, and far less grand, hovering around 5 to 12 feet. The genus name, Sambucus, comes from the Greek word sambuke, which, depending on the source, was either an ancient string instrument, or a flutelike one made by pushing the soft, spongy pith out of elder branches. The common name, “elder,” likely derives from the Anglo-Saxon word aeld, or fire — the hollowed-out stems were used as bellows to fan flames. It’s said that Prometheus carried fire down from Mount Olympus in an elder stem. Both species are characterized by cream-colored blossoms that grow in flat, filigreed clusters called umbels, and tend to bloom in the late spring or early summer. And both produce purplish-black berries that ripen from July to September.

Elderberries — used to make wine, cordials, pies, jellies, jams, and heat-thickened syrup (historically called a “rob”) — get their deep bruise-like color from plant flavonoids called anthocyanins: powerful antioxidants that also have antiviral, antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, antidiabetic, anticarcinogenic, and immunomodulatory effects. They are the superheroes of phytochemicals; the journal Food & Nutrition Research calls them “potent pharmaceutical nutrients.” And while anthocyanins are perhaps the most impressive of all elderberry’s constituents, the berries contain vitamins A and C, iron, potassium, calcium, and phosphorus as well.

The plant was used medicinally as far back as antiquity. The ancient Egyptians mention elderberry in the Ebers Papyrus, the medical text of herbal knowledge dating to 1550 BCE, as a remedy for diarrhea and “to eliminate urine which is too plentiful” — the first known medical reference to diabetes. Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, called it “nature’s medicine chest” in a nod to its broad applications. Dioscorides — another Greek father-physician, in this case of pharmacognosy — notes, in De Materia Medica, that, among elder’s many uses, “the new tender leaves” when “smeared on with bull or goat grease” will “heal hollow ulcers, and help gout.” And the aptly named Pliny the Elder, Roman writer and polymath, devoted an entire chapter to the plant in Naturalis Historia, his 37-book proto-encyclopedia. “A decoction of the root in wine,” he wrote, “brings away the water in dropsy, and acts emolliently upon the uterus… [T]he leaves taken in wine, neutralize the venom of serpents.”

It’s probably not surprising that a plant that could neutralize snake venom has been surrounded by a great deal of myth, lore, and superstition. The elder was associated with the faerie realm, perhaps because faeries and elves love merrymaking and music, especially music played on tiny instruments fashioned from elder wood. If you sat under an elder tree on Midsummer’s Eve, you might have seen faerie royalty and their court procession stride past. The folklore of pagan Europe also held that a nymph or tree spirit (known as a dryad) named Hylde-Moer, or Elder Mother, or Lady Ellhorn — she was the matriarchal tree spirit, the mother of faeries and elves — dwelled within the elder as its protective deity. Cutting down a sacred elder was thus taboo. If elder wood was used for furniture, it was said, Elder Mother would follow the guilty party into their home and torment them. And woe to the person who fashioned a child’s cradle from elder: Elder Mother would torture the baby, pinching him until he bruised. Anyone who needed the tree’s timber was told to appease its spirit by kneeling and asking permission in this specific manner: “Lady Ellhorn, give me some of thy wood, and I will give thee some of mine when it grows in the forest.”

During the Middle Ages, as Christianity spread, the worship of trees and arboreal spirits was verboten: Charlemagne outlawed offerings to sacred trees and other forms of dryad veneration. Much negative lore — created, no doubt, to nullify prior pagan beliefs — came to be associated with the elder. William Langland wrote in Piers Plowman that Judas Iscariot, the apostle who betrayed Jesus, hung himself in despair from an elder tree. The elder was also blighted by the accusation that it was the wood used for the cross on which Jesus was crucified — a charge more commonly made of cypress, pine, cedar, olive, or dogwood. Yet people continued to revere the elder nonetheless, believing that pinning the leaves around a home or barn, or wearing an amulet made from its twigs, would ward off witches and evil spirits. In reality, the plant’s pungent aroma (“the stinking elder,” as Shakespeare wrote in Cymbeline) was repelling flies, mosquitoes, and rodents.

By the seventeenth century, the elder’s reputation was that of a true panacea. John Evelyn, the English intellectual, gardener, and — like his friend Samuel Pepys — prolific diarist, summed up his era’s thinking on elder when he wrote: “If the medicinal properties of its leaves, bark, and berries were fully known, I cannot tell what our countryman could ail for which he might not fetch a remedy…” At the time, it was common practice to consume all parts of the plant — purgatives and emetics were, of course, essential tools in the humoral-theory medical kit — though we now know that the bark, leaves, stems, and unripe or raw berries can be poisonous, as they contain cyanogenic glycosides, phytotoxins that break down into cyanide in the body. In Martin Blochwich’s Anatomia Sambuci, or The Anatomy of the Elder, the first book devoted entirely to the plant — nowadays, we are awash in elderberry porn — the author, a German physician, proposes many elaborate concoctions (“Put them together and beat them in rainwater”), some of which involve inducing retching.

Across the pond, elderberry, if not quite mainstream, was far from unknown. Indigenous tribes — the Cherokee, Paiute, Iroquois, and Micmac among them — had their own traditions of using Sambucus canadensis, the North American species, in ways culinary, medicinal, and recreational. They made infusions of elderflower blossoms as a febrifuge, hollowed out stems for pop guns, rubbed salves from the plant on burns, and cooked berries into pies and pudding. The Eclectic physicians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who used botanical remedies as part of their diverse healing arsenal, also frequently deployed elderberry. King’s American Dispensatory, an 1853 book that laid out the herbs utilized by American medicine, calls Sambucus canadensis “a common, well-known native plant,” and prefigures modern preparations of elderberry: “The expressed juice of the berries, evaporated to the consistence [sic] of a syrup, is a valuable aperient and alterative” — i.e., a tonic that restores regularity and health.

In the Harry Potter series, which next to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien is perhaps the most potent popular literary imagining that connects us to the knowledge of Old Europe, the Elder Wand is one of the most formidable implements in the world of wizarding. Made from the hallowed wood of an elder tree, the wand has a core filled with the tail-hair of a winged horse called a Thestral. It doesn’t surprise me that J.K. Rowling chose elder as the material for her object of sorcery, considering the plant’s fantastical history, and the age-old, abiding belief that it had supernatural powers. These days, we know exactly how elderberry works: It not only inhibits the flu virus from attaching to or entering host cells, it also stops the virus from replicating. But I didn’t know this back in the flu season of 2017–2018, and not getting felled by my annual bronchitis — even as my students hacked and sputtered all around me — simply felt miraculous.

As I write this, winter is on the precipice of spring — a time of year when we feel lackluster as dirty snow, and our immune systems need serious tending. Try some elderberry. With every purple swig, you’ll feel like you’re cultivating your own little faerie garden in your mind. Of course, there’s lots of advice out there telling you that you must forage for elderberries, and then, in an act of epicurean alchemy, cook them down to a remedial syrup on your stove. You can do this if you have time. But you can also buy your elderberry potion at a big-box store, as I did. Practical magic is still magic.