On Thursday 19 July I was standing in the welcome shade of a fine young mulberry tree hard by the east end of Tewkesbury Abbey in Gloucestershire.   The fruit wasn’t ripe, so that there was no mess on the ground - the biggest problem with mulberry trees, as the juice from the ripe fruit stains everything it comes into contact with for weeks.   Just twenty-four hours later flood water was lapping round the tree’s roots, and my car, less than a hundred yards away, would have been six feet under water. A few weeks later I was in Norfolk, where I found another mulberry tree.   This one was at least two hundred and fifty years old and well past its prime.   But it still bore some fruit, large berries which I always describe as exploding loganberries on account of their juiciness.   Although very similar to look at, they are much sweeter, and, believe it or not, more closely related to figs than to the raspberry family.

There are three varieties of mulberry, white, red and black, though the last two are very similar even though one is native to southwest Asia and the other to North America.   The white mulberry is another Asian species, and is the main source of food for the silkworm, the pupa of which is used to make silk.   Hence the popularity of the Silk Route across Europe and Asia in the Middle Ages.   

There are many early references to the tree. We read in the Psalms, for example, that the Almighty destroyed the mulberry trees with frost, but this must be a mistranslation, as the tree had not been introduced into Palestine in Old Testament times. The Roman writer, Ovid, tells how the lovers Pyramus and Thisbe communicated through a crack in the wall separating their houses, a story repeated by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.   One night they eloped and Thisbe was frightened away from their rendez-vous, a white mulberry tree, by a lion which had obviously just finished a meal.   She escaped and hid, but in doing so left her cloak behind to be mauled by the lion.   Pyramus, finding the apparently blood-stained cloak and thinking the worst, impaled himself on his sword, and in doing so his blood turned the mulberries red, and so the western fruits have remained to this day.

It is the black species that thrives best in Britain.   In 1608 King James I, anxious to promote the silk industry, issued an edict encouraging the cultivation of mulberry trees.   The ensuing attempt to rear silkworms was unsuccessful, however, because black mulberries were grown in error, whereas it is the white mulberry on which silkworms flourish. Another strange mulberry story came to light recently.   Publicity around the exhibition of the Queen’s Diamond Wedding suggested that her wedding dress was made of silk from Chinese silkworms.   But a letter to a national paper pointed out that Lady Hart Dyke of Lullingstone Castle in Kent had silkworms and that local people with mulberry trees were asked to help by supplying big hampers of leaves to feed them.   In due course, each provider received a tiny sample of the beautiful material used for the dress.

Finally, what about the nursery rhyme “Here we go round the mulberry bush?”   Apparently it was a children’s game invented by washerwomen to amuse and teach their children.  Originally it was “Here we go round the bramble bush” and chanted by Yorkshire children as they danced round one child who was the bramble bush.   In the 1750s Wakefield Jail had both women and child prisoners, and since there was a mulberry tree in the grounds, the words were changed to suit the location. Mulberry trees are scarce today, and the wood, with its beautiful grain, is much sought-after by wood turners.  I wonder how many there are in Petersfield?   Not that I will be making mulberry jam, much as I love it, but I would like to thank those readers who informed me of the whereabouts of quince trees in the town.   I ‘ve been peeling them a lot recently!

Tom Muckley, October 2007

This article was originally published by the Petersfield Post

tommuckley.co.uk