Herb
A hedgerow tree with a resident: milk-white flowers, black berries, and old manners.
These are associations the community holds, not settled fact — the more a reading is shared, the bolder it sits.
Elder is the tree you are supposed to ask. Across northern Europe it was held to house a spirit — the Elder Mother in England, Hyldemoer in Denmark — and cutting it without permission was thought to bring trouble on the woodcutter. The formula recorded in several English counties is close to a legal one: you ask, you explain what you want it for, and you wait. Whether anyone believed a refusal was possible, they still asked.
It is also the most useful tree in the hedge. Flowers into cordial, berries into wine, the pithy stems hollowed for whistles and, in a detail everyone repeats, for the pipes of the first flutes. The wood was avoided for cradles and for burning indoors, and there is a persistent story that the cross was made from elder, which explains a certain amount of the suspicion.
Practice uses it for protection, for boundaries, and for work with the dead. It is a threshold tree: it grows where people have been, marks old field lines and ruins, and turns up on the edge of things without being planted.
Readings practitioners have offered, ordered by how many recognise them. Take what serves, leave the rest.
Carried forward
English and Danish folk practice
Permission is asked of the Elder Mother before cutting, in a set form of words that varies by county but always names what the wood is wanted for. The custom is recorded well into the nineteenth century by folklorists collecting from people still practising it.
Carried forward
Nicholas Culpeper, The Complete Herbal (1653)
Culpeper says the elder is under the dominion of Venus, and opens by claiming the tree is so well known that describing it would be pointless — then describes it anyway, at length, as he almost always does.
Credit what you carry. Much of this comes from living traditions, and some of it from traditions that are closed — held by particular peoples and not offered for general use. Where you know whose practice a reading came from, name them; where you don't, say that too.