The White Mulberries of the Passage de Milan Gate

A pair of white mulberries flanks the Passage de Milan gate into Parc d'Egmont, one on each side, thick enough that the region's own tree inventory ranks the pair among the eighth-thickest of their species anywhere in Brussels. White mulberry is a different tree from the black mulberry Brussels already protects at the Botanical Garden: paler bark, sweeter and blander fruit, and a species grown across Europe for centuries not for eating but for its leaves, the only food silkworms will reliably take. Neither tree has a documented planting date. What is certain is the pair itself, planted close enough to read as a matched set marking an entrance rather than as two unrelated trees that happened to end up near each other, and a trunk girth of 130 centimetres each that puts them well past a garden sapling's age. Mulberries fruit in July, dark and staining when ripe, and a public park pair like this one rarely gets to keep its harvest: birds strip a mulberry fast. Free to walk past at any hour, on the same lawns as the park's two Turner's oaks and its ginkgo.