Cape Town’s summer days are blazing and long. They are also dry and often windy. The rain comes in winter. A hike through the fragrant fynbos on Table Mountain—the Hoerikwaggo, which means “mountain in the sea”—is essential for anyone who loves plants. Another ritual for me, when I visit, is an elderflower hunt. The introduced shrubs bloom for months in summer. In New York I search for their lacy blooms in early June. But in the greenbelts of Constantia, the Cape Town suburb where my mother lives, the flowers can be found from November through February. Towards late summer they offer what the Sambucus species in the Northeast never have: flowers and fruit at the same time. For someone enchanted by elder’s potential in the kitchen, it’s like Christmas (and the calendar would agree).
Photography by Marie Viljoen.
Four Cape Town summers ago, at home for three months with my mother after my father passed away, I discovered that a favorite elder shrub I used to visit, growing high on the Alphen Trail, a verdant greenbelt following a tiny but steady stream called the Diep River, bordering my parents’ house, had been cut down. In need of a therapeutic project I begged local friends to send me intel about other elderflower locations, and promised, in return, a bottle of the fermented elderflower cordial that I make with the tiny white flowers. A hot tip delivered via WhatsApp (the South African messaging platform of choice) sent me to an unfamiliar trail bisecting a summer-dry wetland, and landed me in the middle of an elderflower motherlode. I picked and picked and picked.
Soon, a large glass jar of elderflower cordial was in progress. The jar had housed cookies when I was little, in another house, in another province, and in another century. Now it was filled with an alchemy of flowers, stirred daily on the kitchen table in the cool light of the gauze-curtained sash windows. The liquid hissed quietly to itself as the fermentation process, fueled by wild yeasts, gained momentum.
Soon, it was ready, bottled and dispensed, as promised, with just enough left over to sip through that summer.
A month later I returned to find the same shrubs loaded—like a gift for sorrowing foragers—with flowers, as well as with fruit, green and fatly purple and ripe. The fruit is toxic, raw, but compelling when cooked or fermented. The unripe elderberries are lacto-fermented and become elderberry capers. Syrups, sauces, and vinegar issue from the ripe fruit.
