The Black Mulberry of the Botanical Garden

A mulberry tree possibly older than Belgium itself grows in a garden that predates the country by four years. The State Botanical Garden of Brussels opened on this site in 1826, on a 6.4 hectare terraced plot at the corner of what is now Rue Royale and the Boulevard du Jardin Botanique, and this black mulberry, its trunk over two metres around, is old enough that it plausibly dates to those original 1820s plantings, though no surviving record names its exact planting year. Black mulberry is a Mediterranean species, slow to fruit and famous for staining anything beneath it a deep purple black when its berries drop in late summer, a domestic habit that made it a fixture of European monastery and manor gardens for centuries before this one arrived in a public botanical collection. The garden itself stopped functioning as a working scientific collection decades ago and is now a public park known simply as Le Botanique, its 19th century glasshouse repurposed as a concert venue, but the trees planted for research have stayed exactly where the botanists left them.