Photo: Ethan Doyle White (CC BY-SA 4.0)
James I wanted Britain to grow its own silk, and in 1608 he ordered mulberry trees planted across the country to feed the silkworms that would spin it.
Black Mulberry
Britain's silk industry failed on a species error and left the trees behind. This page maps every black mulberry on the site, 9 so far across 6 cities.
In 1608 James I ordered mulberries planted across the country to feed silkworms, but silkworms eat white mulberry and mostly refuse black, and black was what went into the ground. Charlton House got one of them and it is still fruiting four centuries later. Christ's College in Cambridge planted another in 1608 or 1609, the year after John Milton was born, and it is now reckoned at 417 years. Nothing here will look large. Mulberries do not build thick trunks, which is why Belgium's national champion measures 1.28 metres around and reads as unremarkable beside almost anything else in the same park. Breda's public library was designed around three of them rather than the other way round. Eight mapped, in five cities, and four of the eight are in London.
London
Photo: Robin Webster, via Geograph Britain and Ireland / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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 last...
Two black mulberries lean on wooden crutches either side of a fountain that has been running since 1681.
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.
Brussels
A mulberry tree possibly older than Belgium itself grows in a garden that predates the country by four years.
Cambridge
Photo: Mr Ignavy, via Geograph/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
James I wanted England to have a silk industry to rival France and Italy, and in the early 1600s ordered mulberry trees planted nationwide to feed silkworms.
Delft
The black mulberry in the courtyard of Hofje van Pauw has been fruiting since before the Dutch East India Company's Delft chamber was a century old.
Breda
A library was built around these trees rather than the other way round.
Antwerp
Sharing Hertoghepark with Belgium's thickest black locust is a much smaller record holder: a black mulberry measured at 1.28 metres around in 1989, listed as the national champion of its species re...
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