[lucywil]

is it possible to grow an elder trees from cuttings?

i had quite a mature one on one of my plots, infact my 6 year old son had a swing hanging from it, but the council is putting a new fence in and they have had to cut it right down to the ground. i want to replace it and just wondered if i could take cutting from ones growing wild when they start to sprout?

[madcat]

If they have only cut it to ground level and haven't inserted loads of tree poison - don't worry, it will come back!  Elder is very very very hard work to kill!

[lucywil]

i am pretty sure that they will be digging anything that is left out on monday with their mechanical digger

[gillie]

Around here elders are not long lived and start to die back when they still quite small.  Also the wood becomes very brittle so I don't think the swing was a very good idea.

If I wanted to grow an elder - and usually they spring up without any encouragement - I would try digging up a young one or I would sow seeds.

There is a very beautiful red leaved elder which you sometimes see in garden centres.  Presumably this is propagated from cuttings but I would guess that these are rooted rather later in the season.

Gillie

[sunshineband]

You can grow elder from semi hardwood cuttings is from the new growth, later in the year.

They also grow well from seed 

[Rangerkris]

You can make fantastic whistles from Elder wood, random i know but they do make a great sound.

[sunshineband]

You can make fantastic whistles from Elder wood, random i know but they do make a great sound.

That's what my brother and I used to do when we were kids 

and use the pith to cut up and string as jewellery too 

[Rangerkris]

You can make fantastic whistles from Elder wood, random i know but they do make a great sound.

That's what my brother and I used to do when we were kids 

and use the pith to cut up and string as jewellery too 

These are things we do as part of our forest schools sessions

[ex-cavator]

There's no old bottles beneath it, are there? Elders typically grow on well drained soil with plenty of humus matter and are consequently one of the signs bottle collectors look for when searching for a dump - 90% of the victorian dump is composed of ash from the household grate, along with food waste. With frequent associations between dumps and allotments as well, I have to ask (and me being a bottle collector as well  )

[aelf]

Whistles - have great fun making them with my scouts at camp. Then there are the flowers and berries that make great wine (but not for the scouts!)

Very useful tree 

[sunshineband]

You can make fantastic whistles from Elder wood, random i know but they do make a great sound.

That's what my brother and I used to do when we were kids 

and use the pith to cut up and string as jewellery too 

These are things we do as part of our forest schools sessions

We were at a loss as to how to make pith helmets however 

[stompy]

I would grow one from seed, if you can wait until autum, (a long time i know.)
But go and taste the berrys from different trees until you find a nice tasteing one.
There are hundreds of varieties of elder trees and some are awful.

Then dry the berrys, remove the seeds and plant
You will have a verry nice tree exactly where you want it with the best tasteing berrys for jams, pies or wine

[lucywil]

thanks everyone for your advice, at the moment the stump is still there so fingers crossed they are going to leave it.

As for elders being brittle, it was a very mature tree, i reckon it had been there at least 20 years and the branch we put my sons swing on was a good hefty branch (about a foot in diameter) and i tested on a regular basis with my weight and i am several stones overweight

I might take some cutting and try from seed as well

[Rangerkris]

You can make fantastic whistles from Elder wood, random i know but they do make a great sound.

That's what my brother and I used to do when we were kids 

and use the pith to cut up and string as jewellery too 

These are things we do as part of our forest schools sessions

We were at a loss as to how to make pith helmets however 

Hope your taking the pith out of me 

[sunshineband]

 

No, really we did