What is the oldest tree in Cambridge?
Cambridge's oldest tree by documented lineage is the Milton Mulberry at Christ's College, grown from the root of a tree planted in 1608 or 1609, the year after John Milton's birth, and still fruiting today despite being uprooted by a storm in 1795. It stands in the Fellows' Garden, viewable as part of a visit to Christ's College in the city centre.
Christ's College planted a mulberry tree in 1608 or 1609, the year after the poet John Milton was born, as part of King James I's push to build an English silk industry by planting mulberries nationwide for silkworms to feed on. Milton studied at Christ's from 1625 to 1629, by which point the tree was already tall, and tradition holds he spent time beneath it, though no record proves he did. The silk scheme failed everywhere, since the species James's advisors chose feeds silkworms poorly, but the mulberry itself survived over a century after the industry died. In 1795 a storm uprooted the tree entirely. Rather than replace it, the college's gardeners let it regrow from its own root, propped on wooden posts ever since, and it still produces a real crop of mulberries each summer, harvested by the college's own gardeners and turned into jam for the kitchens. What stands in the Fellows' Garden today is not, strictly, the tree Milton studied under, but it grew from the same root, in the same spot, without a single year's gap.
One of Cambridge's trees also appears in The Autumn Harvest, a themed collection spanning several cities.