The Groton Winthrop Mulberry
How do I find it? You can recognise it by its trunk lying along the ground rather than standing upright, sending up fresh growth from where it fell, fenced to stop trampling. It stands on The Croft, the village common.
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.
- Species
- Black Mulberry (Morus nigra)
- Location
- The Croft, Groton, Suffolk CO10 5EE (Groton, near Sudbury)
- Access
- Free, on The Croft, an open common/meadow in the village managed since it was set up as a charity by the Groton Winthrop Mulberry Trust, whose registered charitable purpose is 'to preserve the land known as The Croft as an open space for the enjoyment of the residents of Groton and adjoining parishes, and to maintain and protect the historic Mulberry tree.' No gate, ticket or booking found in any source; the tree stands behind a protective wooden fence but the Croft itself reads as open common land, not a private garden (one specialist mulberry-register page describes it as 'a private garden' but this conflicts with the charity's own stated public-benefit purpose and the older local-history description of the Croft as a village common, so treat the tree itself as fenced-off-from-touching rather than the site being closed to visitors).
- Getting there
- No station in Groton; nearest is Sudbury (about 3 miles/5km away, roughly 10 minutes by car, no direct bus route confirmed). Not within a 30-minute public-transport day-trip boundary of any city on our list as far as could be checked in this pass; likely reached by car only.
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Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
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