The Hall's Croft Mulberry

The mulberry at Hall's Croft grows sideways. Its trunk runs almost horizontally through a bed of flowers in the garden of the house where Shakespeare's daughter Susanna lived with her husband, the physician John Hall. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which owns the house, wrote in 2013 that once supported it would take on the character of the much older mulberries at New Place. Leaning is what old mulberries do. The same post quotes the Royal Horticultural Society's advice that they lean and split with age. Whether this one has since been given its supports, nobody has published. That 2013 post is the only account of the tree we have found. It does not give its age, its girth or even its species, though black mulberry, the kind at New Place, is the likely answer. Nobody has dated it. If you visit, tell us what you find, how far it leans now, and whether it fruits. It shares the town with the New Place mulberry, which the Trust believes grew from a cutting of Shakespeare's own, a short walk away through the Old Town. Hall's Croft is ticketed, near Holy Trinity Church, about twelve minutes on foot from the station.