marsh elder
- noun
- Specialized
:
elder de pantano
- The Mississippians were an agricultural people, growing corn, squash, pumpkin, and several seed-bearing plants, such as sunflower, marsh elder, maygrass, little barley, and lamb's quarters.
Examples
-
The marsh elder was blooming beautifully near the riverbank, attracting many bees.
-
Even taller are the shrubby marsh elders and groundsel bushes.
Academic text (1998) -
I pushed among blowing marsh elder growing along the path to the inlet.
Fiction book (1997) -
In the wetlands, the tall marsh elder plants provide shelter for various birds.
-
You can often find marsh elder thriving in the moist soil of the marshlands.
Synonyms
A low bush with small green flowers that grows in salt marshes
A tall annual plant called marsh elder that often causes hay fever and skin rashes
Surface Forms
Morphology
The compound is compositionally built from 'marsh' (wetland) + 'elder' (a shrub), so a learner will infer it denotes a type of elder-like shrub that grows in marshes. This follows a normal noun+noun naming pattern and is immediately interpretable by a B1 learner who knows the constituent words, even if they lack botanical detail about the exact genus.
Etymology
Marsh elder comes from two simple ideas: the plant grows in marsh areas and people thought its leaves looked a little like the common elder tree. So the name tells you it is a coarse 'shrub' that lives in wet ground.
