Nature Features

For two weeks in June every year, a small team of harvesters travel to Easter Park Farm in Nympsfield to handpick the flowers from around 4,000 elder bushes.

Within a matter of weeks, these elderflowers will have been used to make a bottled cordial and will be on sale in a shop near you.

Rita Jones & Caroline Jones help with the harvest

"We start at 8am in the morning and work till the middle of the afternoon", says Mike, who has travelled from Newent to Stroud to help with the harvest.

"We have a gang here of people who are used to harvesting lots of different things, so they really know what to do and are quite professional about the job.

"Once you know what you're doing you can chat about a few other things and you'd be amazed how quick the time goes.

"Also we're looking to get a certain quantity per day and you've got your eye on that too so the time goes really quickly."

Flavour

Chris Baker is an expert when it comes to making and tasting wines and soft drinks.

Elderflower picker, Caroline Jones

For years he has developed his expertise at both the Three Choirs winery in Newent and with Bottlegreen, a soft drinks producer in Stroud.

Each year he organises this elderflower harvest and explains the process further:

"The elderflowers are all hand picked and then put into baskets and taken back to the Three Choirs factory in Newent.

"The same day it's picked it has to be soaked in a sugar syrup which extracts all of the flavour out of the petals - that's for about three days.

"Then we strain off the flowers and that's it, you have a really concentrated elderflower syrup."

The syrup is then transported in bulk to the Bottlegreen factory in Nailsworth, Stroud, where a few more ingredients are added before it's bottled and sold.