The Count's Mulberry of Karolyi Garden

It takes two adults with their arms spread to get around this trunk, and nobody knows who planted it. The two candidates sit half a century apart. Count Antal Karolyi bought the palace next door in 1768 and rebuilt the garden in the baroque manner soon after, which would make the mulberry a tree of the late 1700s. A later Karolyi, Gyorgy, modernised the same garden in the 1830s. Both sources that describe it say plainly that the planting date is unknown and neither picks a side, so somewhere between 230 and 250 years is the working figure rather than a fact. What it stood through is better documented. In 1795 the palace held its reception for the newly installed Palatine Joseph, and in 1800 a name day ball for Alexandra Pavlovna, both of them spilling out into this garden. In 1838 the Danube came into Pest and the palace took in hundreds of families whose houses had dissolved in the water. After the 1848 revolution failed, General Haynau ran his headquarters from the same building, and the garden outside went on being a garden. It is probably the oldest white mulberry in Hungary. Safety pruning has left it blunter than it was, which is the price of keeping a heavy old tree standing in a park full of children. Look along the perimeter wall near the Ferenczy Istvan utca gate. In June and July the fruit drops and stains the path.