Groton is a small Suffolk village with a churchyard, a scatter of farms, and one tree that ties it to American history. Around 1550 the lord of the manor planted a black mulberry on the common that still bears his family's name. His grandson later led the Puritan fleet to Massachusetts Bay and became its first governor, and the Winthrop family in America is said to keep in touch with the village still. There is one tree to see here, and its story reaches further than its size suggests.
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Photo: Oliver Dixon (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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The Groton Winthrop Mulberry
Black Mulberry (Morus nigra) · roughly 475 years · Groton, near Sudbury
A black mulberry in a Suffolk village helped put the first governor on Massachusetts Bay. Adam Winthrop planted it around 1550 at Groton Manor, granted to him after Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries; his grandson John Winthrop grew up on this ground before leading the Puritan fleet across the Atlantic in 1630 and governing the colony he founded. The Winthrop family in America is said to keep in touch with the village still, which makes this tree a minor pilgrimage point for anyone tracing that history back to its start.
The trunk gave up standing decades ago. Mulberries this old rarely die when they fall; the trunk collapses and lies along the ground while the fallen wood roots again and sends up fresh growth, the same trick that keeps London's ancient mulberries alive well past when an oak would be finished. A wooden fence now protects the recumbent tree from being trampled rather than climbed. Sources disagree gently on how open the site is: the tree's own charitable trust exists specifically to keep the surrounding common land open for the village's enjoyment, though one specialist register calls it a private garden. Treat it as common ground with a fence around the tree itself rather than a garden gate. No girth has ever been published; the planting date is the only number anyone recorded, putting the tree at roughly 475 years old.
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