 Hello and welcome to another episode of CNM's Herb Walks we're out here once again in the beautiful Sussex countryside and we've come to see what's available what's around us at this time of year and remember the whole point of a herb walk is to get to know the plants that we can use medicinally where they grow how they grow through the seasons as well and one of the things we're going to be having a look at today is the way things are actually changing through the seasons it's now almost high summer it's mid-summer in fact and we're going to find for example a lot of the flowers are now turning into berries and we're going to be discussing the different parts of the plants that we can use as they come in season as well and do remember that you know it's getting out there the whole joy of a herb walk is not just doing it once but just keeping on going out there whenever you can observing getting to know the plants looking at how they develop and change through the seasons and kind of you know getting to know the whole natural world as opposed to you know just kind of having it served up if you like in pills on a plate or wherever and this is real stuff this is real herbal medicine in the making here so let's get out and see what we can find so here we are lucky to find elder well I say that but there's so much of this about at the moment the interesting thing about this particular plant here is because we have both flower and the beginnings of berries as well so we've got the plant basically in two stages of development here now this is a plant that is absolutely steeped in history folklore and even magic it's it's latin name sandbuckus is what is thought to come from a musical instrument either a harp or opinions differ it might be actually a wind instrument as well the flexibility and the ease of hollowing out the elder make it a good sounding wood for musical instruments but the name elder itself comes from the anglo-saxon eld or eldron meaning eld meaning fire and eldron meaning furnace and although it was actually thought very ill advised to burn the elder itself these hollowed out stalks of elder or twigs or branches of elder were used actually to blow on fires to get them aflame now it was thought that there was a spirit or a goddess living in the elder that would have has the power either to hurt or protect and your approach to the elder would make the differences to which this was you were supposed to approach the elder with a particular invocation if you wanted to use her wood or any part of her for medicinal or protective purposes and the invocation went like this you had to bow your head and say lady eldron give me of thy wood and i will give the of mine when i become a tree now the elder gives us so much medicinally it's chiefly known in herbal medicine as what we call a diaphragmatic herb which means that it helps to promote perspiration and it does this particularly effectively at moments when you might be just coming down with a cold or the flu or something like that so any febrile condition to kind of help it bring on the fever break the fever and cool down the whole system but in addition to that elder actually has some very substantial antiviral properties as well and they are contained in all parts of the plant so the flower here and as we know of course elder is a is a is a very popular ingredient for cordials and soft drinks and also alcoholic beverages elder flower wine and it has this wonderful aromatic scent which as the flowers go off will turn slightly fetid actually but this one's really nice really sweet at the moment you'll recognize the smell if you go up to one of these and and put it close to your nose and then of course when the flowers die off after they've been pollinated and they mature they turn into these little tiny green berries here which of course in the fullness of time in a couple of months time will start turning purple they'll expand and turn purple very rich with antioxidants and again with these antiviral properties so the antiviral properties are contained both in the flower and the berry but some herbalists believe that the antiviral properties as the leaves are actually stronger about five times stronger than either flowers or berries and you do have to treat the leaves properly the flowers you can use pretty much as they are they're probably you know you can use them fresh actually berries you should take a little bit of care of because they can actually have sometimes unpredictable reactions they can cause what we call catharsis which means that you might be looking for a toilet rather quickly if you take too much of it however a small amount of elder berries syrup every day throughout the winter can actually help you to keep quite nicely protected from the winter snuffles so many many of you might be familiar with elder's role to help our immune systems to help us through colds and flu and that sort of thing as an antiviral and a general immune assistance but what many of you may not know is that this plant can also help with mending fractures broken bones and that is particularly a function of the leaves the small stems and the bark of the tree and if you boil that up maybe about four ounces of that material boil it up in a quart of water reduce it down to about a pint divided into three doses and take that three times a day for a couple of weeks or so you can actually really powerfully speed up the healing of broken bones I've done it myself when I broke my ankle a few years ago and it wasn't healing too well I was probably challenging it too much and walking around on it too much but I actually learned this tip halfway through trying to heal my ankle I immediately started using the elder it was in the autumn so I was very lucky to catch the last of the leaves there but I have to say that it worked an absolute treat in about two weeks that healing was almost complete