The Syon Park Mulberries

In March 1604 the Percy family bought ten mulberry trees for Syon, and the purchase is still written down in their archives. Six more followed in 1645 and 1646. Morus Londinium, the survey of London's mulberries, reads those entries with care. If all ten of the first batch survived, it says, some of the trees here could be more than 416 years old. That if matters. Nobody has dated an individual trunk, so the age here is an estimate from the purchase records, broad on purpose. What you can see is how these trees have aged. Old mulberries layer, their branches settling to the ground and rooting, and the orchard south-east of the house is now a set of multi-stemmed rings with the original central trunks almost gone. The tallest of the six stands about eight metres. Nineteenth-century writers were already describing a very old tree here with its branches down on the ground. You may hear that the botanist William Turner planted a mulberry at Syon in 1548. The survey found no evidence of mulberries here that early, so treat that as a legend and the 1604 purchase as the record. One more tree stands apart, alone in a fenced enclosure in the water meadow that the house's long gallery looks over, leaning and propped, probably once part of the same orchard. Syon's grounds are ticketed, so check the opening days before you go.