Stems.—Scarcely woody, five to ten feet high. Leaves.—Divided into toothed leaflets. Flowers.—White, small, in flat-topped clusters. Calyx.—Lobes minute or none. Corolla.—With five spreading lobes. Stamens.—Five. Pistil.—One, with three stigmas. Fruit.—Dark purple, berry-like.
The common elder borders the lanes and streams with its spreading flower-clusters in early summer, and in the later year is noticeable for the dark berries from which “elderberry wine” is brewed by the country people. The fine white wood is easily cut and is used for skewers and pegs. A decoction of the leaves serves the gardener a good purpose in protecting delicate plants from caterpillars. Evelyn wrote of it: “If the medicinal properties of the leaves, berries, bark, etc., were thoroughly known, I cannot tell what our countrymen could ail for which he might not fetch from every hedge, whether from sickness or wound.”
The white pith can easily be removed from the stems, hence the old English name of bore-wood.
PLATE XXII
BLACK COHOSH.—C. racemosa.
The name elder is probably derived from the Anglo-Saxon aeld—a fire—and is thought to refer to the former use of the hollow branches in blowing up a fire.
Spurge.
Euphorbia corollata. Spurge Family.
Stem.—Two or three feet high. Leaves.—Ovate, lance-shaped or linear. Flowers.—Clustered within the usually five-lobed, cup-shaped involucre which was formerly considered the flower itself; the male flowers numerous and lining its base, consisting each of a single stamen; the female flower solitary in the middle of the involucre, consisting of a three-lobed ovary with three styles, each style being two-cleft. Pod.—On a slender stalk, smooth.
In this plant the showy white appendages of the cup-shaped clustered involucres are usually taken for the petals of the flower; only the botanist suspecting that the minute organs within these involucres really form a cluster of separate flowers of different sexes. While the most northerly range in the Eastern States of this spurge is usually considered to be New York, the botany states that it has been recently naturalized in Massachusetts. It blossoms from July till October.