The Silk Mulberries of Giardino Paul Harris

These three trees were planted as machinery. White mulberry leaf is the only thing a silkworm will eat, and for centuries the gardens and field edges around Bergamo were planted with mulberries to supply the province's silk trade, which stripped the leaves each spring and fed them to trays of larvae in farmhouse lofts. The industry is gone. Its trees are still here, in a small public garden in the Santa Lucia district, where three old white mulberries survive as a group. The national register lists them exactly that way, as a homogeneous set rather than three separate specimens, with no individual measurements, so what you are visiting is a garden with three trunks in it rather than one named tree. That is also why the pin is approximate: the register gives the garden's centre point and nothing finer, though the garden is small enough that the trees find you. Mulberries grown for leaf were cut back hard year after year, and it shows in the species: squat trunks, heavy stubbed limbs, none of the reach of a tree left alone. Beyond the register a single local source names them and their silk connection, and their ages are unrecorded. In June and July they drop pale fruit that stains the path underfoot.