The mulberry tree
You plant a flower for yourself, but you plant a tree for your grandchildren: so the saying goes. They’re usually talking about walnuts, but I’m having that making-your-mark feeling about the mulberry sapling I’m about to plant.
I like the thought that one day there will be a big, spreading mulberry tree arching across the strip of land at the top of my garden. Its branches will hop with birds (especially in late autumn when the luscious blackberry-like fruits arrive). Chickens will peck at its feet: or maybe sheep will graze, or a pony rest in the shade. Someone as yet undreamed of – maybe, if my innermost hopes come true, my great-great-grandchildren – will look up into its branches and wonder who it was that planted this old, gnarled tree and what life can have been like so many decades and centuries ago.
Well: if such a thing as the internet still exists then, I’ll tell ‘em: it was me. And life is pretty good, thanks, though we still have old-fashioned things like cars and televisions and two-dimensional pictures on the wall that don’t even move. Can you imagine?
The person who planted the first mulberry tree in England must have been thinking much the same thing. He (and it almost certainly was a he) was enjoying early 17th century life under King James I. I don’t suppose he could have imagined so much as a tarmac road, let alone motorbikes and aeroplanes and computers and mobile phones.
He was a gardener at Buckingham Palace, where silk had just arrived and was all the rage. In 1608 James I planted around three and a half acres of mulberry orchard from trees imported from Europe, where all the silk came from, so that he could cultivate silkworms in his back garden. He also ordered landowners to plant 10,000 mulberry trees each.
But for all his royal zeal, he should have learned his Latin a little better. The mulberries bought in their thousands were Morus nigra - the black mulberry. Too bad silkworms only eat white mulberries – Morus alba. Oops.
Still, though King James ended up with expensive egg on his face he did (if accidentally) hand us down one of the loveliest fruit trees of them all. Mulberries have huge, heart-shaped leaves and grow into wonderfully twisted, gnarled trees: they live to be properly ancient (the oldest is one of those originally planted by King James, growing at Charlton House in Greenwich, London). Good thing too, as they grow ve-e-e-e-ry slowly and can take years to fruit. I’m not expecting to pick much from mine for another four or five years at least.
That old mulberry garden still exists at Buckingham Palace, though now it’s a National Collection of 27 different varieties. Mine is good old ‘King James’: the classic, also sold as ‘Chelsea’. They have big, juicy purply-black fruits of a tangy sweetness often compared to raspberries (though with more than a hint of blackberry). They’ll stain your fingers an indelible shade of burgundy, as if to remind you how delicious they were long after you’ve licked away the last drop of juice.
