White mulberry
Last month my tiny son and I drove our truck west through Pointe Coupée parish, headed to Arnaudville. This is one of my favorite drives this time of year. The edges of the roads, sugarcane, rice, and crawfish fields are adorned with blankets of clasping coneflower and sporadically dotted with clusters of swamp spider lilies, among other late spring treasures.
We were visiting our dear friends, Lilli and Mel. Lilli’s recently restored the old library there and calls it home. It’s in the middle of town, tucked away on a quiet dead end next to the little brick jailhouse and surrounded by open fields. She has been doing beautiful work in her small tract of land—planting natives, allowing grass to grow wild. We have plans to fill all the empty spaces with native trees.
During this last visit, her two old mulberry trees were fruiting in the yard, and that is where my son and I spent so much of our weekend, me picking, him eating. He carried a bowl half the size of himself around, waiting for his bounty to fall. This lovely dance under the tree reminded me how much mulberries have been intertwined in my life as of late. All so fitting in a tiny Cajun town whose name was once “La Mûrier”—“The Mulberry Tree.”
"This tree has a rich history with all human groups who have encountered it—culinarily, medicinally, spiritually, architecturally."
Lilli’s mulberry trees are white mulberry, Morus alba. White mulberries are of Chinese origin and were brought over to Georgia in the late 1700s via European colonists. There was a great attempt to use the white mulberries, host to the silkmoth, to mimic silk production elsewhere in the world. In his writings, the famed naturalist William Bartram mentions that at some point, every landowner in the English colonies was required to grow at least two white mulberries to help aid the grand New World silk experiment, which ultimately found no footing
Then there is the red mulberry, Morus rubra—our native mulberry, the most commonly encountered mulberry here next to its white counterpart. This tree has a rich history with all human groups who have encountered it—culinarily, medicinally, spiritually, architecturally.
The native tree’s fruit, like the white mulberry, is sweet and full of depth—a food source for humans as well as birds and small mammals. It’s a joyous sight to watch the squirrels and other wildlife fight over the hard-to-reach berries. The mulberry is also a host plant to the morning clark butterfly and countless other pollinators; older trees’ giant rotten hollowed branches house so much life, while still producing excess fruit.
[Read this next—"In Defense of the Trash Tree"]
My passionate affair with the red mulberry began near the Mississippi River in the hills of St. Francisville years before I called the area home. We had pulled over on the side of a narrow country road to bask in the wild stands of oakleaf hydrangeas we stumbled upon. To our further delight, amongst the hydrangeas, there were red mulberry trees, loaded with fruit. We stood on the truck for hours, harvesting every berry we could reach.
To me, there is no more important native fruit tree than the red mulberry—nor an easier one to care for. This tree is known to love a wet space—swamp/bog edge, river banks, ravines, and so on. Yet, I have also seen it pop up in disturbed dry spaces, roadsides, full sun, full shade.
Last spring, a tornado upended half of my wooded acreage, causing many strange and interesting things to happen—a new abundance of sunlight among them. A year later, I have a handful of mulberry trees that volunteered themselves by seed, growing over fifteen feet high, producing bounties of berries.
I have been playing around with them, moving them to fill in empty spots, capitalizing on their growth rate. Others have popped up in my perennial gardens. Instead of removing them, I have been pruning their lanky form to experiment and see how they could, perhaps, stick around in my smaller spaces.
White and red mulberry trees can be hard to differentiate. One way to identify them is to examine the leaf hue and texture: a red mulberry has a duller and more textured leaf, while the white mulberry leaves are smoother to the touch and have more of a sheen/gloss to them. However, even this strategy can be uncertain, as the two species so readily hybridize. Many believe there are no “true” red mulberries out there anymore—that every tree we have encountered has crossed genes by now with the white mulberry. I used to think similarly until developing my own relationship with the mulberries on my land. My red mulberries are true!
There is, in addition, a third mulberry thriving in the southeast worth mentioning—though I would rather live without it: the invasive paper mulberry, Broussonetia papyrifera. Thomas Jefferson, with his alleys of paper mulberry at Monticello, popularized the species, and I have cursed his name ever since I learned of it. This tree spreads rapidly by seed and roots, proving totally detrimental to native plants and the larger ecosystem. It chokes out urban waterways, does not respond well to chemicals, and the more you cut it back, the harder it returns and spreads. The only time I have seen it completely eradicated (without use by powerful machine) was with my buddy, Donnie—who has made it his mission to take down the paper mulberry in his Spanish Town neighborhood in Baton Rouge, preventing it from choking out nearby gardens. He follows the root system and digs it up entirely—I am telling you, entirely. He is legendary for this. His work sees no lines, digging from yard to yard. With the removal of a wild paper mulberry patch on my property, Donnie opened my backyard up, giving space and sunlight for my swamp red maple and cherry tree to fill out and flourish.
The only redeeming quality of the paper mulberry? Its fruit is just as tasty as that of its close relatives!
