A cordial way to spend the day

The elderflower harvest in the Vale of Belvoir sees the community come together to meet growing demand for this delicious taste of summer

- Flora Watkins

WHEN the elderflower starts frothing in the hedgerows in late May, it is the cue for those in the know to grab their baskets and walking sticks and go foraging. They’ll head for the glades and corners colonised by the elder, where its great white soup plates of blossom give out the headiest Muscat scent. (The best spots are closely guarded secrets.) At the end of the day, entire families line up outside the Belvoir drinks factory in Leicestershire with their spoils, so the sacks of flowers can be weighed and exchanged for cash.

These bucolic scenes could hail from time immemorial, like something from the pages of a Thomas Hardy novel. We can almost see Tess Durbeyfield brushing the yellow pollen from her lips—and yet, this hedgerow harvest is a relatively recent tradition. ‘In the early days, it was mum and dad and me each driving a car with a bunch of local school kids we could persuade to skive off school,’ admits Belvoir’s managing director, Pev Manners.

It all began in 1984, when Mr Manners’s mother, Lady Mary, was overwhelmed by demand from friends for her delicious cordial. Her husband, Lord John [the 10th Duke of Rutland’s brother], encouraged her to make 100 cases to sell commercially.

‘My mother got the recipe from Lady Astor when they were staying at Cliveden,’ Mr Manners divulges. ‘Lady Astor always had it on her drinks tray and mum asked for the recipe.’ Lady Mary’s handwritten instructions (with a couple of tweaks for the factory) are still used today—although, with about 10 million bottles of Belvoir’s elderflower cordial now sold worldwide (with growing demand from Japan, France and America), the harvest has had to be ramped up from those original three car-loads.