The Sint-Geertrui Wine Press Mulberry

Belgium protects this mulberry the way it protects a building. A decree signed on 12 July 2010 put a twenty metre radius of legal protection around it, ground included, because the tree has grown into the corner of the former wine press house of the Sint-Geertrui abbey and the register treats the two as one thing: a mulberry that forms a unity with the protected Wijnpershuis it leans on. The measurements explain the leaning. A survey in October 2013 recorded 244 centimetres round the trunk and only 60 centimetres of that trunk before it forks, with a crown spreading 17 metres. Black mulberry does this with age. It sags, splits low and props itself on whatever is there rather than standing upright, so an old one looks like it is going over and usually is not. The Wijnpershuis was listed as a monument in 1938 and now houses De Wijnpers, the provincial horticulture school, which has worked on the site for over a century. A school for growers, with a legally protected mulberry leaning on the wall of its oldest building. Nobody has dated the tree. Girth alone cannot settle it on a low, multi-stemmed species like this one, so the age field is empty rather than invented. If a Leuven record holds the year, we would like to see it.