Easy to grow tall shrub: Sambucus 'Black Tower'

In today’s plant feature I&looking at this magnificent plant, the mighty Elder. Sambucus &Tower&as the name suggests is a tall, elegant shrub that is so suited to the smaller space and garden where plants of this shape lend themselves to the overall design. They grow quickly and are extremely hardy, the distinctive shape and form of the leaves I&always loved and when they&arranged in this form the results work well both up close but also from a distance. The type of flower head they produce is extremely similar to those found on the other examples of Sambucus, a classic ‘landing pad’ arrangement where masses of tiny individual flowers are held on a robust structure with the tiny petals coloured a soft pale pink. A highly attractive feature in early summer. Like so many dark leaved plants it works visually if you position them with a backdrop of contrasting colour to set the black colour off even more prominently. The rate of growth on all the Sambucus including the more widely grown cultivars like &Lace&is speedy, Sambucus &Tower&is as good if not even slightly faster. Once established you can expect to see 30 to 40cm of growth with every season that passes until it reaches its final height. The soil conditions want to be reasonable, in principle they¬ overly fussy as plants but you want to avoid ground that becomes overly wet in the winter. They seem happiest growing in full sun and can cope with a windier exposed site, it may just take them a little longer to...