Rubble Elder

Overview

Rubble elder is the shrub that comes first to a ruin. A wall falls, a roof goes, and within a few years an elder is growing out of the rubble, fed by the lime and the rot. In the Broken Marches it gives the people who live in the ruins flowers, berries, and medicine, and in return it takes the ruin apart, root by root.

Appearance

It grows as a big, untidy shrub or a small tree, two or three times a person's height, its many stems arching from the base. The bark is pale grey-brown, corky, and deeply grooved; the young shoots are full of soft white pith and snap easily. The leaves are made of five or seven toothed leaflets and smell unpleasant when crushed. In early summer it bears flat plates of tiny creamy-white flowers as wide as a hand, heavy with a sweet, musky scent. In autumn these become drooping bunches of small, shiny, purple-black berries on red stalks, so heavy that the branches bend.

Habitat and Range

It grows on rich, disturbed, limy ground: rubble heaps, wall gaps, roofless rooms, ruined yards, and the edges of middens, across the Marches and in the yards and culvert mouths of Lowbank in the Greyford Reach. It grows wherever birds have dropped its seed, and birds rest on ruins.

Behaviour and Temperament

It grows fast, a stride or more a year, and roots wherever it can reach water. In a ruin its roots go into every joint of the masonry and every crack in a vault, and as they thicken they lift stones, split mortar, and open walls that had stood for centuries. Cut down, it comes back from the stump.

Life Cycle

It flowers from its third or fourth year and fruits every autumn. A shrub lives a few decades; the roots outlast the stems and send up new ones.

Uses and Dangers

Its flowers make a sweet cordial and a tea for colds and fevers that every Marches household brews in winter, and they are fried in batter in summer. The cooked berries make a dark syrup for coughs, a wine, and a purple dye; raw, they and the leaves, bark, and root gripe the bowels and are not eaten. Its hollow stems, pushed clear of pith, make pipes, whistles, and blowpipes for fires. Goblins of the Marches gather it more than anyone.

Its roots are the danger, not to people but to their works. A salvage crew judging whether a structure is braced, unsound, or never-touch looks first for elder in the joints, and a ruin with an elder growing out of its vault is read as worse than it looks.

Lore and Belief

Marches folk say an elder grows only where a house has died and is its mourner, and they will not burn its wood, which is said to bring a death to the hearth. Goblins say a ruin with an elder on it has been claimed by somebody, and ask before they salvage it. Human households hang a branch over the door against ill wishes.

Delvers say the elder's roots find the cellars first, and more than one treasure-seeker has followed an elder's roots down through a cracked floor into a sealed vault, and more than one has been under the floor when it gave.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Plants and Fungi
• Vines