| Sambucus canadensis, [American elder,] is a shrub from six to ten feet high, with a branching stem, covered with a rough gray bark, and containing a large spongy pith. The small branches and leaf-stalks are very smooth. The leaves are opposite, pinnate, sometimes bipinnate, and composed usually of five to nine oblong-oval, acuminate, smooth, shining, deep-green leaflets; the veins of the under surface are somewhat pubescent. The flowers are small, white, and disposed in loose cymes; the cream-colored corolla is wheel-shaped, with five stamens on the tube. The berries are small, globular, and deep purple when ripe. The shrubs grow in low, moist grounds, along fences, and on the borders of small streams, throughout the United States, from Canada to the Carolinas, and westward as far as Arizona and Texas. It flowers from May to July, and ripens its fruit early in autumn.
[The flower is] small, from 2 to 3 mm. in breadth, shrivelled; calyx superior, five-lobed; corolla cream-colored to brownish-yellow, rotate, flat or slightly campanulate, regularly five-lobed; stamens five inserted at the base of the corolla, and alternating with its lobes, filaments slender, anthers oblong, yellow; pollen ellipsoidal or tetrahedral and rounded, covered with finely punctate markings and having three pores.
The common elder, Sambucus nigra, of Europe, differs from the American most obviously in its size, the former approaching in height that of a small tree. The stem is much branched towards the top, and has a rough whitish bark. The leaves are narrower. The flowers are small, whitish and in five-parted cymes. The ovary consists of but three carpels, there being five cells in S. canadensis L. The berries are larger in the European elder, globular, and blackish-purple when ripe.
Source: United States Dispensatory (1918) [5]
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