Ventnor Botanic Garden's curator Chris Kidd is mapping the Isle of Wight's mulberries

by Peter Coles

200 year-old mulberry near Little Town

Chris Kidd, Curator of the spectacular Ventnor Botanic Garden in the Isle of Wight (largely his creation), has set himself another ambitious task – to map the Island’s mulberry trees. Taking up Morus Londinium’s challenge of extending its survey beyond Greater London, Chris has been regularly contributing details of mulberry trees – and their stories – that he has spotted on his travels in Britain over the past few years. 

This map of the Isle of Wight mulberries is probably alreadu out of date

Every now and then out of the blue I have been getting an email from Chris with details of a new find, not just on the Isle of Wight, where he has lived most of his working life, but from the Scilly Isles, Jersey… and further afield on the ‘mainland’.  He can rightly claim to have added the most southerly mulberry on Morus Londinium’s map.   

So it was with massive enthiusiasm that I took up Chris’s offer of spending a few days with him on the Isle of Wight earlier in September to see some of his best finds – and to go on the hunt for new ones.  Although the summer’s uninterrupted hot, dry weather came abruptly to an end the day after I arrived, we spent the week criss-crossing the Island, from private houses to manor houses, from a priory and a former primary school to Winterbourne, in Bonchurch, the beautiful house where Charles Dickens had written part of his 1850 autobiographical novel, David Copperfield.

The most spectacular tree we found was without doubt a sprawling black mulberry off the beaten track on a farm (see photo above), likely to be over 200 years old and once part of an orchard. It keeled over many years ago and has thown up no fewer than three new trunks from the horizontal main stem, through a process known as ‘layering’ – a way some plants propagate themselves. The owner showed us a lovely bowl he had turned on his lathe using dead mulberry wood, and a carved mossy clump topped by toadstools. He then treated us to homemade mulberry gin (and shared the recipe). We could easily have spent the whole day with him and his daughter. 

Sculpture from centenarian mulberry wood

Our mulberry hunt had some serendipitous twists and turns and in the end threw up around 20 new trees to add to the Island’s map, just while I was there. Surprising to Chris was the presence of several mature white mulberry trees on the island (most are M. nigra, the black mulberry). One was impressivley spotted by Chris from his moving car as we drove along a main road. It turned out that the twin-stemmed Morus alba had been planted as seed around 1977 by the late husband of the owner. 

Meanwhile, at The Community Shed – a community garden and woodworking, arts and crafts workshop in Ventor – local historian Leigh Geddes reminisced how, in the 1950s, she and her classmates had fed silkworms with leaves from the two nearby mulberry trees, when they were part of her school’s grounds.

Ventnor Botanic Garden's black mulberry

Ventnor Botanic Garden has its own veteran black mulberry, too, undoubtedly planted around 1871, thinks Chris, when this was the site of the Royal National Hospital for Consumption and Diseases of the Chest. Now rather crowded out by what he describes as “the second largest Laurus azorica in Britain and a hefty Eucalyptus globulus,” the mulberry is nevertheless putting on a show of strength, fighting for the light by sending out a vigorous new branch. “Never a tree to say die,” says Chris. “Given half a chance the mulberry will see out another 150 years.”

Chris will be writing up his own account of his (and our)  finds, so I won’t spoil his story. There may be many more surprising mulberries still  to come to light in the Island’s Mediterranean microclimate. I’m already planning a return trip to photograph the trees when the foliage has fallen. 

In the meantime, if anyone reading this knows of mulberry trees in the Isle of Wight, please contact us (or Chris directly. via the Ventnor Botanic Garden website. (https://www.botanic.co.uk)

All photos (c) Peter Coles