Taking the pith!

 There are two kinds of Elderberries locally - one with black/dark purple berries and one with red.  I was familiar with the black berried one, Elder (Sambucus nigra), which grows all over Britain and Ireland apart from a few mountainous areas of Scotland.  As a child, I used to try and make ink from the berries, without much success. In Newtonmore, most of the berries are green at the moment, with the odd few turning black.

Elder

Elder has white flowers, usually appearing after the last frost, in a flat-topped "umbel," which can be used to make elderflower drinks. And, as is usually the case, I find that the really common things are the ones I don't have a photo of! (When I wrote the Wildflower Walks book, I found I didn't have a photo of a dandelion....)

The other Elder is Red-berried Elder (Sambucus racemosa), and I had not noticed it when I lived in Cheshire.  It is mainly found in  the North and East of Scotland:

Red-berried Elder

Its flowers look similar to Elder but are arranged differently, in a panicle - a loosely branched arrangement of flowers, rather than having a flat top like an umbel.  You can see what I mean in this photo of the buds, taken in April near the church at Loch Insh.

Flower buds of Red-berried Elder

The leaves of both trees are so similar that I could not tell them apart when there were no flowers or berries. However, there is an amazing book by John Poland and Eric Clement, "The Vegetative Key to the British Flora" - in other words - how to tell what a plant is when it doesn't have any flowers to help you. There was a useful tip on telling the difference between the two Elders:

Elder: "Twigs with white pith and fetid gravy odour"

Red-berried Elder: "Twigs with orange-brown pith, often with a faint blackcurrant odour"

Well, I can't say I noticed the smell but the colour of the pith certainly works, with one proviso which I'll come to in a minute.

Here's the  white pith of an Elder twig:

White pith of Elder twig

And on the left hand side is the orange brown pith of a Red-berried Elder:  

Pith of Red-berried Elder

Now for the proviso.  Choose your twig carefully. The first shoot I tried had white pith (the right-hand side of this photo).  That didn't seem right.   I knew it was a Red-berried Elder as I was standing next to the red berries.  But what I learned was that you have to pick a woody twig like the one on the left, (definitely orange pith) NOT a green shoot as the pith is still white in the new shoots.

There are a large number of Red-berried Elder bushes on the steep slope alongside the road between Newtonmore and Kingussie.