The Silk Abbot's Mulberry

Zlatá Koruna's last abbot went into silk. Bohumír Bylanský ran the monastery until Joseph II dissolved it in 1785, and among the ventures he set up here was silkworm rearing, which meant planting mulberries to feed the worms. This tree is the last of those mulberries still standing, which puts it somewhere between 220 and 260 years old, counted back from the end of his tenure rather than from any recorded planting day. Two details are worth holding lightly. Silkworms are normally raised on white mulberry; this is a black one, the species people plant when they are after the fruit. And the register's girth of 450 centimetres is very large for a mulberry trunk. Old black mulberries lean, spread and throw stems from low down, so that tape may have gone round more than one trunk, and no second measurement exists to check it against. It still fruits. The monastery that planted it was shut down two and a half centuries ago and the silkworms are long gone, and every summer it drops black fruit onto the ground beside the monastery pond, which is where it grows, just inside the entrance gate. Getting to it means the monastery ticket and its opening hours, closed Mondays like the rest of the site.