Purple-foliaged Elderberry

The sky is overcast and the ground is still wet from yesterday's rain. A cool breeze alternates with a warm glow, when the sun burns through the clouds.. A pair of sparrows scolds me - my lawn chair is parked way too close to their nest . All the other birds are still celebrating yesterday's rain.

I'm waiting out a migraine.

Birdsong and the dull roar of traffic - I'm surrounded by sound and movement. It wasn't always this way. Twenty-five years ago there were less trees and fewer birds in my yard. I could distinguish the sounds of individual cars climbing a nearby hill. Now the a continuous streams of car sounds creates a relentless chorus - perfect migraine music.

Weeknights we slept outside all summer long. In our dreams we heard the lonely sounds of a late night car headed for home. Back then the night skies were dark, except in the east where a soft brown glow on the clouds indicated Seattle.

I pass the time admiring a purple-foliaged Elderberry. The dark foliage is easy on the eyes. (Bright light aggravates migraines) The new leaves start out green and color purple as they age. All of the tips of the branches are tinted with a green blush of tiny new leaves.

Sudden shoots of green sprout up in the heartlands of the bush where you would expect purple. Here and there are individual leaves with startling patches of green, as if someone was in a hurry and didn't take the time to purple all of the leaves properly.

The blossoms begin as tiny balls of lime green floating on the ends of upright burgundy stems. When they open the petals are white and the stamens are somewhere between salmon and rose. The stamens open unevenly creating a salmon/rose blush that floats ever so lightly above the airy panicles of white and the underlying trusses of burgundy.

Each cluster of flowers is unique and they open in waves so you can see all of the stages of bloom at once. Up close the details are stunning. From a distance they harmonize well and become one of the loveliest plants in the garden - so nice that I forget to suffer my migraine.

This purple-foliaged elderberry is at least twenty feet tall. When I planted it, six years ago, the label said it would grow to eight or twelve feet tall. My purple-foliaged elderberry has beat the odds and doubled the expectations.

Most sources underestimate the ultimate height of trees and shrubs. The best excuse I've heard is that the labels only tell you the height you could expect in ten years time, under average conditions. As if ten years is the expected lifespan of your garden - your connection to one place.

This works fine for just about everyone. Most of us are short-timers - who knows where we will be in ten years time? Nurseries sell more plants when you have to yank out your purple-foliaged Elderberry because it is crowding out your petunias. And we can prune the dickens out of it, until it fits our expectations.

The pithy stems of the Elderberry make excellent firesticks (rub two sticks together) or so one of my renters told me. He should know - he taught wilderness survival skills.

He more or less camped out in his room which was completely unadorned. Except for the floor along one wall where he stashed his tools and artifacts - everything made by hand with found objects. It was like a prehistoric art gallery for hunters and gatherers.

We tend to shun our hunter and gatherer past - considering it, a bleak and squalid existence. After seeing the artifacts he made - I'm not so sure anymore. If he lived outside all year round his arguments for voluntary primitivism might have been more persuasive.

As the summer drags on the foliage loses some of its purple luster, more green shows through. The green and purple mix to make brown. A wonderful brown reminiscent of kids who play with their colors too long.

As if this was not enough for one plant, in the Fall the Purple-foliaged Elderberry makes deep purple almost black berries. You can leave them for the birds, but I like to make pies from them.