The Inner Temple Mulberry

The Inner Temple's garden opens to the public for two and a half hours on weekday afternoons, and this tree is a fair reason to time the visit. A black mulberry stands by the railings of Benchers' Walk, outside Paper Buildings, its trunk about a metre and a half around and ten metres of crown above it. The Inner Temple's own history of the garden names it as one of the survivors of an old orchard, alongside a large-fruiting walnut and a quince, which is the institution itself calling this inherited planting rather than decoration. What no source will say is how old it is. There is no planting date anywhere, and black mulberries are among the hardest trees to age: they rot hollow early, lean until they need propping, and root wherever a low branch touches soil, so the trunk stops being a record of anything. This entry carries no age for that reason rather than a guess. The ground is famous for a scene that never happened here. Shakespeare set the plucking of the red and white roses, and with it the start of the Wars of the Roses, in the Temple garden; the tree is centuries younger than the fiction. Two hundred and fifty metres across the lane, Middle Temple's mulberries at Fountain Court at least have a disputed planting date to argue over. This one does not even have that.