The Evelyn Mulberry

John Evelyn's garden at Sayes Court was one of the most celebrated in 17th century England, laid out by a writer and diarist who helped define English ideas about forestry and planting, and it lasted less than four decades before a tenant wrecked it for sport. Tsar Peter the Great of Russia rented the house in 1698 while studying shipbuilding nearby, and legend holds that he spent his evenings being wheeled through Evelyn's prized holly hedges in a wheelbarrow, flattening years of careful topiary for entertainment. Historians doubt Peter planted anything here himself, and this mulberry's own age is uncertain enough that the honest claim is only that it may have survived the same visit that ruined everything around it, not that it predates the destruction with certainty. What remains today is a fenced, propped tree standing in an unremarkable public park where almost nothing else of Evelyn's garden survives, plus a stone marker at its base that tells visitors the wheelbarrow story rather than leaving them to wonder why one old mulberry gets special treatment. It still fruits every August, one of the few parts of Sayes Court's story that still repeats on schedule rather than existing only in an old diary.