A pair of white mulberries flanks the Passage de Milan gate into Parc d'Egmont, one on each side, thick enough that the region's own tree inventory ranks the pair among the eighth-thickest of their...
White Mulberry
Morus alba
These trees were planted as machinery. We map 15 of them, in 14 cities.
White mulberry leaf is the only thing a silkworm will eat, so every ruler who fancied a silk industry ordered mulberries into the ground, and the trees stayed long after the venture folded. At the Krka falls in Croatia, the Green Lady stands below the ruins of a mill, about 400 years old by the national park's account; in the 1830s nearby Skradin was the largest silkworm-breeding centre in Dalmatia. Maria Theresa's push put orchards across Taban in Buda, which is most likely where Budapest's oldest mulberry comes from, whatever the Ottoman legend says. Around Bergamo the leaves fed trays of larvae in farmhouse lofts, and three of those trees still stand in a public garden. Split's, in the courtyard of Hajduk's first ground, was DNA sampled in 2015 and cloned 105 times, once per year of the club.
Brussels
Seville
This mulberry's trunk runs 4 metres round, unusually thick for a species more often kept small and heavily pruned for its leaves than left to grow into a full tree.
Berlin
This tree belongs to the species whose leaves fed the silk trade, and it grows in a hill park in Kreuzberg.
Verona
A large mulberry anchors what remains of a private estate's tree collection, one of the oldest specimens documented in Parco delle Colombare, a hillside park whose ownership shifted repeatedly befo...
Sofia
According to a story that has passed down through Sofia for generations, Vasil Levski, the revolutionary Bulgarians call the Apostle of Freedom, used to tie his horse to a mulberry tree on what is...
Washington DC
This tree fell over in May 2019 and the Park Service refused to remove it.
Budapest
Popular legend says Ottoman occupiers planted this mulberry during their century and a half ruling Buda, which would make it well over 400 years old; the more carefully sourced version, and the one...
It takes two adults with their arms spread to get around this trunk, and nobody knows who planted it.
Bucharest
According to a story carved onto a plaque in its own church porch, a boy named Manciu once told Prince Constantin Brâncoveanu that the mulberry tree he had just been scolded for climbing would outl...
Oxford
White Mulberry is not a tree Britain's climate treats kindly.
Split
In 2015 a team from Zagreb's Faculty of Science took a DNA sample from an ailing mulberry tree in Split and cloned it 105 times, once for every year of HNK Hajduk Split's existence.
Bergamo
These three trees were planted as machinery.
Krka National Park
At Skradinski Buk, the famous falls of the Krka, a white mulberry about 400 years old stands on the right bank, below the ruins of the Budim mill.
Senica
A white mulberry in the middle of Senica carries two titles most trees never get to hold: the town's own Tree of the City, and a national Tree of the Year champion four years later.
Photo: Alena Hroncová (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Veliki Preslav
By local tradition, the revolutionary Stefan Karadzha once hid from the Ottoman authorities in a pub beside this mulberry.
Explore by city: Brussels · Seville · Berlin · Verona · Washington DC · Budapest · Oxford · Bergamo · every city · or browse all species.