Medicinal Monday How Many Ways Was Box Elder Used?

Box Elder also known as Acer negundo is a species of maple trees native to North America. Native Americans found many uses for this fast-growing tree from medicine and culinary uses to ceremonial and practical uses. While it is a maple, box elder is the least productive maple when it comes to tapping the tree for maple syrup.

About Box Elder

This fast-growing short-lived tree has been naturalized throughout the world including in South America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. It is in the soapberry family and its native range extends from the East Coast including Connecticut to California, and from Alberta Canada to southern Mexico and Guatemala. The typical life span of this tree is between 60 and 75 years. A distinguishing characteristic of the Box Elder tree is its irregular shape with its trunk quickly splitting into multiple wide-spread branches resulting in a broad tree top that resembles shrubbery. Unlike most maples, the leaves are opposite, pinnately compound with three to five leaflets that have a margin that is coarsely serrated and somewhat lobed. The twigs are purplish green and stout, the bark is grey-brown, and the branches are smooth. It is the last maple tree to bloom in late February and March. Flowers appear before leaves emerge. These trees produce thousands of flowers, the male flowers are red and the female flower looking like hanging grapes is yellowish. The fruit occurs in long-stalked clusters with paired-winged fruit. These trees are commonly found in wet soil by rivers or streams that are normally flooded.

Practical Uses of Box Maple

It is well documented that Native Americans used boxed elder to create tools, pipes, drums, dishes, and bowls. In 1931, several Anasazi flutes were discovered that dated back to the 17th century that was made entirely of elder boxwood. The Navajo used wood to make tubes for bellows.

Culinary Uses

Native Americans used the cambium for food and boiled down the sap and used it as a sweetener and to make candy. Many Native American communities boiled the sap to make sugar and syrup.  The Apache would boil the inner bark until sugar crystalized out of it. The Cheyenne mixed the sap with shavings from the inner part of an animal hide and would eat it as candy. The wood was burned in cooking fires to cook meat and stews.

Ceremonial

The Chyene would burn the wood like incense to make spiritual medicines. The Dakota, Sioux, and Omaha made charcoal from burnt wood and used it for tattooing and ceremonial painting. The Keres used twigs as prayer sticks, The Kiowa burned wood on an altar during a peyote ceremony. The Tewa used twigs to make pipe stems.

Medicinal

Many Native American communities made a decoction from the bark and drank it to make them vomit.

Did You Know

Other names for the Box Elder tree are ash leaf maple, stinking ash, sugar ash, cut leaf maple, and in Canada, Manitoba maple.

It is one of the most widespread and best-known maple trees and is the most widely distributed of all the North American Maple trees.

Fruits are an important source of food for Virginia white-tailed deer, eastern chipmunks, migratory birds, and insects such as moths, butterflies, and eastern boxelder bugs. 

Box elder trees are crucial food sources for Lepidopterans such as moths and butterflies during their caterpillar stage. 

There is a town called Box Elder in South Dakota and there is a Box Elder County in Utah.

Early American settlers who were familiar with Elders back in England, saw a similarity in its foliage. Its wood is said to be whiteish like that of an Old World evergreen shrub called the common box. The two were combined and this new world tree was called Box Elder.

Some states consider Box Elder trees invasive.