Respect your elders

Duff Hart-Davis meets a Cotswold farmer who has turned his land over to a crop of weeds

High on the edge of the Cotswold plateau, near the village of Nailsworth, an ambitious agricultural experiment is starting to bear fruit. The largest plantation of elder bushes in England, covering 75 acres, is now three years old. This week, pickers were out collecting the heavily scented flowers, and the owner, Richard Kelly, was cautiously optimistic that as his little forest grows on towards maturity, it will start to do him proud.

An elder plantation? It sounds a contradiction in terms, for the straggling bushes normally grow wild along hedges and woodland borders. Yet in 1994 a combination of two quite different factors prompted Richard to launch his radical innovation. One was that he faced major expense if he was to upgrade the dairy farming enterprise which then dominated his farm; the other, that the Bottle Green Drinks company, which makes elderflower cordial and other soft beverages in the neighbouring village of South Woodchester, was looking for somebody to grow its raw material .

Until then, Bottle Green had relied on wild supplies of elderflowers, and during each short season, for a few weeks in May and June, had launched an army of several hundred pickers into the surrounding countryside, paying pounds 1 per pound for good flowers brought in. This method produced an adequate harvest, but it also provoked irritation among landowners who saw strangers raiding their hedges and smashing down the bushes, often without asking permission. Another drawback was that the company could not call its products organic, because there was always a chance that some of the flowers might have been contaminated by fall-out from road traffic or agricultural sprays.

Bottle Green, then, were keen to find a regular supplier, and when Richard offered the use of his land, the two decided on a joint venture. Having sold his dairy herd, Richard set out to research the strange plant on which he proposed to base his future. He learnt that human beings had used elder at least since Roman times, and that the shrub had an ambivalent reputation. Known as a frequenter of dung-heaps and churchyards, because it likes rich soil, elder was credited with strong medicinal powers, and also with the ability to ward off evil. In Victorian times the drivers of hearses carried whips with handles made of elder-wood, to keep the devil at bay.

The plant itself embodies many ambiguities: the flowers smell of honey, and the leaves of mice; the white pith inside young branches is the lightest natural substance known to man, but mature wood is as hard and heavy as ebony.

Folklore was one thing, the plants themselves quite another. In his search for 30,000 bushes Richard cleaned out most of the nurseries in England, Wales and Scotland, and had to go to Holland for his last 5,000. Having conducted soil tests, he set out his plantation in rows aligned north and south, with the bushes at 3-metre intervals, and sat back to watch them grow.

Little did he realise what he had let himself in for. Every one of the Dutch saplings died, as did 2,000 of the home stock. Grass and weeds threatened to overwhelm the surviving plants: an experiment with chemical herbicides on a trial plot showed that any elder touched by the spray collapsed; so he reverted to organic methods, mulching the plants with straw and manure. Now he hopes to use free-range chickens, loose among the rows, as living weed-controllers and providers of fertiliser.

"We thought elder was a pioneer species that would grow like a weed anywhere," he says. "But we've realised now that it's a sensitive plant, which needs good soil, a lot of light, and shelter from the wind."

Last year he and his helpers applied 700 tons of manure, forking it by hand from trailers. Badgers, attracted by the worms and slugs under the straw, began digging up the roots; voles joined in the subterranean attack, and roebucks from the adjoining woods frayed the springy stems with their antlers. Pigeons pecked out the flower buds, and cuckoo-spit invaded new shoots.

So the plantations are patchy - but in the best areas the bushes look wonderful. Frequent pruning has made them grow many more stems than they would in the wild; the manure has given them luxuriant foliage, and flowers 8in or 10in across. This year's harvest is small, but Richard has always reckoned that he would not get his first full crop until the year 2000.

He remains agog to see what the plantation's yield will amount to. A bucketful of flowers, not pressed down, weighs about 21/2 lb, and calculating on the basis of a wild elder of roughly the size that he hopes his bushes will reach, he reckons that each should produce between 4lb and 9lb a year, for up to 30 years. If all goes well, gross income could be as high as pounds 80,000 per annum.

When the farm enters full production, the itinerant, seasonal pickers will work it, instead of despoiling local hedgerows, and the output should fulfil all the needs of Bottle Green, even though the company has expanded fast, with recent sales to Saudi Arabia and Nigeria.

One remaining challenge is to find a use for the dark berries which ripen in the autumn if flowers are left in place. "We've looked at elderberry cordial, which sounds like something that should sell," says Kit Morris, one of Bottle Green's founders. "But in fact the juice has a lot of tannin and colour and not much else." In preparing his Spiced Berry Cordial, he soon decided that "the less elderberry in it, the better", and ended up using a blackcurrant base.

Yet out on the farm Richard remains hopeful of creating a second product from his bushes: he recently heard that the berries contain as much protein as eggs, and the gleam in his eye is that he may be on to a source of cheap protein for Third World countries.