I had scrawled the word mulberries across the pages of my calendar for the first week of August. It was to remind me that this was the short window of time that these delicious knobbly clusters more muscular than a blackberry, sweeter than a raspberry, fully ripen and fall from the tree. For I wanted to make jam. Not any old jam mind. This jam was going to be special. A conserve created from the darkened crop of an ancient black mulberry tree. Planted in the gardens of Balliol College, one of the University’s oldest endowments. Over 400 years ago. Still bearing fruit, I’d been given the go ahead to take what I needed.
And so it is that clutching a plastic container with which to gather my sticky pickings (you rarely see them for sale in the shops so short is their shelf life), I weave my way through the throngs of tourists on Broad Street, turning through Balliol’s great gates where the porters on duty direct me across the Front Quad, down a dark passageway and into an open expanse of lawn. There are five mulberry trees in the garden, one was planted by Queen Mary in 1921 and another by Princess Margaret in the 1950’s.
But the oldest, the one that I had come to visit, is associated with another royal. Lying prostrate in a flowerbed, its trunk gnarled, its branches propped, this is one of the very few that have survived from the thousands of mulberry saplings imported from Europe in 1609 by King James 1. He’d wanted to create a domestic silk industry, instead of buying the stuff from abroad at vast expense. And as the leaves of the mulberry were the silk moth caterpillar’s only food, he persuaded rich landowners to plant them on their estates. Some Oxford and Cambridge colleges also bought into the idea – the other Oxford mulberry from this date that still survives is at Merton College. He planted hundreds in the grounds of his Royal Palaces at Greenwich and St James Park. Our National Collection of Mulberries is still held at Buckingham Palace. He even appointed a Keeper of the King’s Silkworms.
There have been lots of suggestions as to why the project failed. Some say it was because James 1 imported the wrong kind of mulberry. For it is the white mulberry (morus alba), not the black mulberry (morus nigra) we have here at Balliol, that is native to East Asia and has been nurtured as food for silkworms in China for over four millennia. And it was the white mulberry that was planted by James’ great rival Henry IV of France in the Tuileries gardens of the Louvre Palace in Paris, that created the raw materials to manufacture what became known as ‘woven wind’. Others say that although James thought he was buying white mulberries, he was tricked by French suppliers who passed off black saplings as their albino alternative. The most likely explanation is that both were delivered but only the black survived. At the beginning of the 17th century, we were experiencing a mini-ice age, the first decade the era of the famous frost fairs on the Thames. Our cool damp climate was better suited to the black mulberry, native to Persia, cultivated as far back as Roman times across Europe for the shade of its heart shaped leaves and its intensely sweet bulbous fruit. Before the days of refined sugar production, they may have been short lived, but that heady sweetness must have been a welcome nectar. And so it was that the hardy black mulberry triumphed and trees are still found in country houses and Oxford colleges.
You certainly can’t make jam from the white mulberry, smiles a friendly gardener, as I set about picking the healthy crop from the age-old stump. So though I am sorry that King James never secured a thriving silk trade I am grateful to him for today’s harvest. Soon my hands are bloodied from their seeping juices – they are not called blood fruit for nothing – my lips a ruby red. And carrying them carefully home I boil them up in the pan with a little sugar and lemon (they are low in pectin so you will need something to thicken) and I have enough to make a jar full. It’s a dark burgundy colour, sweet, pippy and delicious on toast. Like the season, it disappeared all too quickly. I must write myself a note in the calendar for next year. This time pick more mulberries.
To find out more about the marvellous mulberry there is a brilliant website dedicated to the tree edited by Peter Coles https://moruslondinium.org
The black mulberry has a phoenix like ability to reroot. The 1609 tree was originally planted the other side of this low lying wall in the Fellows Garden. Blown over by a storm in 1905, the old trunk put down new roots from buds underneath the bark in a process called ‘layering’. It’s the same tree but ‘reborn’ now in the Garden Quad.
This photograph was taken in 1913 of three Balliol students including Aldous Huxley, just before the First World War. Could this be our mulberry tree after it had been blown over? ©Balliol College Archive
The tree with the old Balliol College Library behind.
There are four other black mulberries at the college. This one stands in front of William Butterfield’s striped chapel. Its gnarled trunk belies its more recent age
The berries at various stages of ripening.
I came across this rare white mulberry tree Morus alba, on the south wall of the walled garden while walking in Oxford’s Botanic Garden. It’s dated at roughly 200 years old which makes it the oldest in the country.
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Fascinating about the silk worms. We kept one as a pet when I was a child and fed it leaves from a friend’s mulberry tree – but if that was a black mulberry (as now seems likely) they were the wrong kind of leaves! I now have a mulberry tree of my own and I highly recommend the berries freshly picked, with or without cream. Beware of raiding a neighbour’s tree without permission – you will literally end up red handed.
Is there a link to the children’s nursery rhyme “Here we go round the mulberry bush”?
“On a cold and frosty morning” may relate to the weather at the time and the failed silk industry.
Some people think that the nursery rhyme was a satirical stab at James 1’s blunder at importing the wrong mulberry. But it is more likely to have been crafted by female inmates at Wakefield prison where a 400 year old mulberry tree still stands in the outside yard. The women would dance around it before taking on mundane tasks like this is the way we wash our clothes etc and sing as they went. The staff dining hall is still called The Mulberry and the tree is on their coat of arms.
Meghan Markle should have consulted you before making her VERY inferior jams/spreads!
Thank you for such a fascinating article about the Mulberry Trees. I’ve seen the enormous Mulberry at Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury (pictured behind this ‘Tree of Life’ sculpture https://gainsborough.org/event/helaine-blumenfeld-obe/ in the walled garden (crinkle-crankle wall too!) Sudbury was biggest exporter of silk goods in the UK. The Gainsborough House Museum has a Silk Gallery in the old House.
We lived in The Veron in Touraine for several years; as it has a warm and sheltered micro climate between two rivers, it was favoured for mulberry growing in 16 -18th centuries. There was a major silk processing and weaving industry in Tours, but the initial sorting and cleaning of the cocoons was done in the farms
Many of the manor farms acquired names which reflected their involvement, which included the word or syllable ‘Maur / Mor.’. When the silk industry had vanished, this connection was forgotten, and a myth grew up that these places were so called because they had been inhabited by ‘moors’ or Saracens, supposedly driven into the narrow triangle between the rivers by Charles Martel after the Battle of Tours. People used to say that the inhabitants of the villages there were ‘swarthy’ , and that they spoke a Moorish patois ( they were actually quite inbred until the 20c as there was no bridge and only small roads).