The hedges are frothing with elderflowers and the air is heavy with their tangy perfume: it must be June.
You can raid the hedgerows, or grow your own: elder is really easy to grow and not too big so fits in to smaller gardens very well. It’s a gawky wildling of a shrub though, and nothing much to look at when it’s not flowering.
I find it’s better when coppiced each spring - cut back hard to a base framework in around February and it bounces back with much more elegant stems. This is especially true of the much better looking purple-leaved elder, ‘Black Lace’, which also produces the loveliest pink flowers - letting you make pink cordial (and of course champagne, but that’s for another, more boozy post).
Gather in your elderflowers as they open: this is trickier than it seems as elderflowers are compound heads of multiple tiny flowers which don’t all open at the same time. You don’t want too many tightly-closed bobbles, or too many flowers which are over and are going brown. The key, for me, is the perfume level: if you can smell it as you approach the tree, you know the flowers are good to go.
Here’s my much-tweaked and tested recipe for elderflower cordial - the one I make every year as a much-cherished seasonal ritual. The joy of making your own cordials is that you can adjust things like sugar level and flavour strength to your own tastes - so don’t be afraid to play around with the quantities of sugar and flowers. Just remember to keep notes!
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