The New Place Mulberry

Shakespeare's own mulberry was cut down in 1756, and this one may be its child. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which looks after the site of his last home at New Place, believes the black mulberry in the Great Garden grew from a cutting of the tree the poet is said to have planted, felled that year by the Reverend Francis Gastrell. Both halves of that sentence are tradition. The Trust says believed, and so do we. The Trust puts the tree at around 270 years old, which fits a cutting taken soon after the felling. Its blog called it, in 2013, a venerable and massive tree still bearing fruit, and it still earns its keep. The Trust harvests the mulberries for a New Place Mulberry Gin Liqueur. The felled tree did not disappear either. Its wood became souvenirs, among them a chair dated 1862 that is said to have been made from it. One tradition ended up as furniture, the other is still growing in the garden where it began. A second, younger mulberry shares the garden, planted by the actor Dame Peggy Ashcroft in 1969. It split in 2013. New Place is ticketed and about ten minutes on foot from Stratford-upon-Avon station.