Hope & Mulberries
A tree once associated with wealth and empire now humbly inhabits the space where industrial agriculture crumbles under its own weight.
For the past five days, I’ve been watching the rain forecast swell for today. This morning, NWS backed off on the chances for precipitation again. It’s full sun out there right now. I’ll say this, though… all this drought does seem to make the mulberries sweeter. The serviceberries and black cap raspberries are all extra sweet too, but they’re a bit shrunken or shriveled or something. The strawberries had their moment, and are now feeling quite parched, their blooms stifled, their leaves curled. As far as fruit tree foliage goes, the pears, peaches, and apples appear weathered, dull, and exasperated. The mulberry leaves though, they gleam. They shine in the sun, neon green at the tips, vigorous in the hot wind. We planted two dozen new mulberries this year; it rained the day after they went in, and that’s been it for six weeks now, give or take a few ephemeral bouts of precipitation. All of them are alive, rooted, and putting on significant growth. Some people call this tree a weed, and entire state governments have led poisoning campaigns against it. And they’re not winning.
In my last piece, I scratched the surface on mulberries a little. But now, I’m going to take a bit more time and space to get down to it. Why? Because mulberries could continue to play a vital role in the human project of agriculture for time to come, if we as a species decide to keep tending soil for food as opposed to lab engineering it. And I’m awful fond of them too.
The mulberry has been in cultivation for some 7,000 years, give or take a millenium, and is widely considered to be the first agroforestry crop. A crop that has shared an evolution with humans since neolithic times has a few things to show for it. I have alluded to the fruit, leaf fodder, and coppicing abilities already, and here I’m going to share a bit more on how we’re integrating these trees into our diverse foodscape, and honor some of the work that has taken this tree as far as it has come. If I were to document and distill those first, say, 6,500 years, this would be a much larger document than I can handle, with so many things needing tending, so I’ll be focusing on mulberries in their post-settlement North American context, that is, how they interplay with our current problems.
Mulberries have been present on our land and in our region for some time. We are well within the native range of Morus rubra here in Northeast Missouri, and seem to have fewer alba or hybrid specimens present, as the brief North American silk industry never quite crept out here. Still, there are plenty around. The first silk speculation bubble popped early on, supplanted by tobacco, a less laborious, more profitable crop, and cotton, a fiber crop that was far more profitable, for some folks anyway. Morus alba is widely used for silk culture, as this is the tree that had been selected for larger, more nutritious, and more readily stripped leaves for going on 7 millennia.