No ideas to offer, but wanted to say just make sure you don't plant too close to the box. Maybe check city ordinances about this too. On my street a neighbour planted a garden to block his view of an electrical box, but when the city came to do maintenance on the box a few years later, they cut down a beautiful globe blue spruce and some spireas (and trampled his perennial bed doing it), because they were within 3' of the box. Apparently it was a city ordinance that none of us knew about.

LOTS of misinformation going on here!! Elderberries - Sambucus species - are self fertile. You do NOT need two different varieties to get fruit but you will have much larger and more reliable cropping if you do. This is the same for any sort of self fertile fruit. These are caning shrubs - not trees - and do best in full sun and with reasonably moist soil. Raw fruits is perfectly edible but so astringent as to be virtually unpalatable. That's why most sources recommend cooking or otherwise 'preparing' the fruit, rather than eating fresh. Red elderberries (S. racemosa) are seldom used for berry production as they tend to be less palatable than the darker berried forms and reportedly are toxic if eaten out of hand (although they taste so bad fresh, I can't imagine anyone doing so!!). btw, as long as bloom times coincide, black elder can cross pollinate blue or American elder. Elder flowers are wind pollinated. And blue (S. caerulea) and American (S. canadensis) tend to be the tastiest and heaviest croppers of the various species.

I have been enjoying everyones gorgeous gardens and fabulous flower pictures. We finally have warm weather here in Wisconsin. Tulips, daffodills and other early spring flowers have come and gone. Roses,peonies and others are not blooming yet.My flowering trees were a week to 10 days later than normal but as you can see by this one. It was worth the wait.

I haven't been able to determine the variety, but it's OK, I think I'm going to try to salvage it either way. It's an impromptu choice that I usually avoid, BUT!! 1. My girlfriend buys elderberry supplements, so it might save some money in the long run; 2. They're all pretty as a backdrop; 3. I'll need something there, anyway; 4. They obviously do well here with little or no maintenance; and 5. If wildlife love them, @Old Forester ( Zones 8a-6a ) Ga/NC, then it might be a nice recovery for all of the saplings I'll be cutting down this Winter. I think that I've mowed over this plant a thousand times over the years, thinking it was a weed, so it DESERVES a little love!! LOL Now I'm going to go on the hunt to find 9 more, so I can create a hedge to cover about a 100' stretch. It's a challenge because they look a lot like the blackberry vines that are everywhere, but right now the blackberries have flowers so I should have a few weeks where these will be more obvious. @Old Forester ( Zones 8a-6a ) Ga/NC, do you think it would be OK to put them all in containers or (better) a temporary garden, and then transplant them next Spring? My plan is to cut out a ton of saplings this Winter (waiting for hummingbirds to leave for the season) to replace them with fruit and nut trees, and this new hedge would go around the outer perimeter of where those saplings currently are.