The White Mulberry of the Botanic Garden

White Mulberry is not a tree Britain's climate treats kindly. It was imported by the thousand in the 17th and 18th centuries in a failed attempt to build a domestic silk industry, since it is the preferred food of silkworms, and most of those plantings died out or were grubbed up once the silk scheme collapsed. Oxford Botanic Garden's specimen survived because it was never planted for industry. It dates to the late 1790s, when the garden's keeper John Sibthorp rearranged the grounds and its planting scheme, and it is now thought to be the oldest White Mulberry still growing anywhere in Britain, a claim made by Morus Londinium, the mulberry research project that tracks the species' surviving specimens nationwide. Two and a bit centuries on, the tree has the low, wide, gnarled habit White Mulberries take on with age rather than the upright form of a young specimen, its bark deeply fissured. It stands as one of the oldest plants in a garden already 400 years old, a survivor twice over: first of an industry that failed around it, then of two more centuries most of its own species in Britain never reached.