The Washington Monument Witness Mulberry
National Mallthe National Mall
Approximate location.
This tree fell over in May 2019 and the Park Service refused to remove it. Days of rain had saturated the ground on the Washington Monument lawn, the main buttress root snapped, and the larger of two old white mulberries here went down. Instead of cutting it up, arborists raised the trunk back by about ten degrees, enough to encourage new feeder roots without tearing what was left of the root plate, and built it a steel crutch. It has been standing nearly horizontal on that prop ever since, living on roughly 60 percent of its roots. Its neighbour, the shorter of the pair, leans hard and is crutched too, and is in better condition. Both are recorded by the Park Service witness tree programme as part of the landscape planted after the monument was completed in 1885, probably in the 1890s, which puts them somewhere around 130 to 140 years old. Be clear about what this is. It is not a grand tree and it is not a pretty one. It is a public agency visibly refusing to give up on something that history happened around, propped in plain sight at roughly seven o'clock on the circular path. And it is fragile: the most recent confirmation of its condition we have found dates from December 2023, so that is the last time anyone we can cite looked at it.
From people who stood here
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Getting there
Washington Monument grounds, on the circular walking path southwest of the monument, National Mall, Washington, DC
You can recognise it by the trunk lying nearly horizontal on a steel crutch, the larger of the two crutched mulberries here. It stands on the circular path southwest of the Washington Monument, at about seven o'clock.
Free, fully public. Stands on open NPS parkland on the Washington Monument grounds, directly on a paved circular path, unrestricted viewing.
About 10-12 min walk from Smithsonian Metro station (Blue/Orange/Silver).
In fruit
May to June: pale sweet fruit, the leaves that fed the silk trade
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.