London's Charlton House Mulberry

This Old Tree with Doug Still
London’s Charlton House Mulberry - Transcript
Season 2, Episode 8
November 18, 2024

 Doug Still  00:00
You're listening to This Old Tree, the show about heritage trees and the human stories behind them. I'm Doug still. 

Did you know the British are mad about mulberries? 

[music]

Sure, they are a people that love trees and horticulture in general, but the mulberry tree seems to hold a special place in their hearts. It has been the subject of nursery rhymes, poems and artwork. Ripe mulberry fruit has long been foraged, to be mashed into delicious jelly, syrup, smoothies, or sprinkled on biscuits with whipped cream. Historic landscapes and royal parks feature the tree, including the garden at Buckingham Palace that houses the UK National Mulberry Collection. 

Old mulberry trees can be found all around London if you know where to look. And looking for them is the mission of a local organization called Morus Londinium, which maps where they are and offers tours for the “mulberry curious.” On a recent trip to London, I had the pleasure of interviewing the group's leader, Peter Coles. Peter told me to meet him at the oldest living specimen in London, a 400 year old black mulberry on the grounds of a Jacobean mansion called Charlton house. I also had a lesson in the manor's history from the Chair of the Charlton and Blackheath Amateur Horticultural Society, Dr Stella Butler. To understand why this amazing tree is standing where it is today gets at the essential story and mystique of this gnarly but fruitful species. You might guess that it has something to do with the Crown, and you'd be right, but you might not guess that it was a government decree gone awry that led to the mulberry’s popularity. 

Join me to hear all about the Charlton house Mulberry. I'm Doug still, and this is This Old Tree.

[This Old Tree theme song]

Doug Still  02:21
Charlton House and Gardens was way across London from my hotel in Kensington, so it took about an hour to get there by train. Charlton is a leafy neighborhood on the south bank of the Thames, right next to the Royal Borough of Greenwich. In fact, it used to be part of it. I arrived to find an impressive three story brick manor house with a tower on each end. It's set back off of Charlton Road, fronted by a large lawn and symmetrical planting beds. Pedestrians with dogs and pushing strollers were finding their way around to a public park at the rear of the house, where you can also find gorgeous perennial gardens surrounded by brick walls that are maintained by a small staff and volunteers. The house is now a museum open to the public, managed by the Royal Greenwich Heritage Trust. I met Peter in the cafe. You may remember Peter from a previous episode when I interviewed him remotely about another mulberry tree in Truro, Massachusetts. After some tea, we strolled back to a corner of the front lawn where their noble tree is located, surrounded by a circular iron fence for its protection. We chatted there, and I got to know him better. 

So I'm at the Charlton house mulberry with author Peter Coles, who wrote the book Mulberry. 2017?

Peter Coles  03:42
2019 actually, at the very end, actually

Doug Still  03:44
Such a beautiful book with glossy pages and great illustrations. That really caught my attention, one of my favorite books.

Peter Coles  03:53
Oh, good. Thank you. The content is down to me, but the presentation is the publisher. They're a very good publisher.

Doug Still  04:01
Now you're also the manager, or I don't know what you would call it, of Morris Londinium.

Peter Coles  04:06
Yeah, I co-founded this, and I'm also the person who runs it from day to day.

Doug Still  04:10
What is it? How would you describe it?

Peter Coles  04:12
It is a citizen science mapping project, really, I suppose, whose ambition was to document and preserve, initially, London's mulberry tree heritage. And by London, we meant within the ring road really, which goes around the city, called the M 25 and that just defined a geographic area for us. And when we applied for funding to get this project going, we had to make it achievable and definable, and so that we could measure some kind of progress and results. So we defined it to that area that was in 2016 and we got funding for 18 months for that, and it's now grown a lot since then. So, its ambition then was to document, preserve and raise awareness of our mulberry tree heritage, which is unique. There isn't another country in the world that has exactly the configuration we have of mulberry trees. 

Doug Still  05:12
Peter described others who were an inspiration during the early days of Morris Londinium. The first was Tim Tyler from Bristol in the southwest of England, who had been documenting mulberry trees. Secondly, a blogger who goes by the pseudonym “The Gentle Author,” had been writing about mulberry trees in his popular blog Spitalfields Life. Spitalfields is a neighborhood in the East End that used to be the silk weavers district of London, home to immigrant Huguenots from France in the 1600s who brought silk industry knowledge with them. The Gentle Author had been telling this story and mapping the mulberry trees. Additionally, Peter had been collaborating on historical research with Karen Liljenberg, a Tibetan scholar interested in the provenance of early mulberry trees. James Coleman of the Conservation Foundation at the time, created the Morris Londinian website and managed it for the first two years. So there was direct interest on multiple fronts. 

Well, let me ask you about your personal connection to mulberries. 

Peter Coles
Okay. 

Doug Still
Which was the first mulberry that captured your imagination. 

Peter Coles  06:20
I grew up near woodlands in a place called the Chilterns, which is a district of Chalk Hills not far from London to the north. And I spent my childhood with my brothers and parents and our dog walking in the woods. So I have an affinity with trees that goes back to my earliest memories, and I'll cut the long story short. I got very interested in trees as survivors, and trees, therefore veteran trees, trees that span various generations and various centuries and so on. And I was lucky enough to live in a place called Hatfield, which has a house about the same age as the one we're standing next to, a Jacobean house from the 1600s and that has many veteran trees in it, ancient oaks and so on that are possibly 600 years old. As a photographer, since teenage years, I started to photograph these just for their beauty, and to preserve them and to record them in a way as survivors of these different generations. 

And I was trying to organize some what I called urban nature walks, which was trying to find evidence of nature within the city, so you don't get this notion that the city is here and it's all concrete and glass, and over there you've got the countryside and it's all cows and hedges and fields. So I was saying that nature is in the city, and without it, probably we wouldn't survive. [Very important] Yeah. So that was one of my ambitions, to take some students around, actually, and show them. And in my researching for places to take them on walks, I found an old mulberry tree, which is, I hope perhaps we'll see later on in Sayes Court, which is the other side of Greenwich to where we are now, and that belonged to a diarist called John Evelyn, who lived at the same time as Samuel Pepys, and he also witnessed the Great Fire of London. So that situates his writings as a diarist around 1666. And so my interest in this grew, and it grew to the extent that I couldn't actually really keep up with it without finding an alternative to my day job.

Doug Still  08:21
What was your day job? 

Peter Coles  08:22
My day job was a journalist and a writer and a photographer. So that was my day job, and it still is, actually, and I translate from French to English as well.

Doug Still  08:31
Would they have been documenting tree planting in the 1600s?

Peter Coles  08:36
Not really. No. The notion of trees as ornament predates the 1600s but not by a huge amount, actually. The 1600s is often taken as a kind of watershed moment where interest in trees and woodlands and things started because there was a change in the relationship to trees and interest in preserving them.

Doug Still  08:59
So if a tree made it past 1600, then there's a much better chance of it living, for having some legacy.

Peter Coles  09:08
Yeah, and people taking an interest in preserving it, I suppose. Yeah

Doug Still  09:12
I understand there's evidence that mulberries were planted in Britain well before James I. What is the earliest evidence of mulberries?

Peter Coles  09:21
Okay, that's a good question, because we're standing next to a tree which has a plaque, which you've reminded me is there, which says it was the first mulberry tree introduced to England in 1608, and the House does apparently date from them. I always thought it was 1611, but what's three years, very old.

Doug Still  09:39
The sign, it's cracked.

Peter Coles  09:40
Old sign is cracked, and it might not necessarily be wrong either. It's just that there is some ambiguity when you look at the records as to when this house could have…

Doug Still  09:49
Could I read the text? [Yeah] It says, “Tthe first mulberry tree planted in England in the year 1608, by order of King James I.” But we know that that's not true, right?

Peter Coles  10:02
It wasn't the first tree in England. Now the reason that we know that's true is for lots of different reasons. One is when the Romans settled in England in the first century. AD. They really, they came and they were kind of sent out back again, and then they came back in about 73 ad, and then they stayed here until about 435 or something. They stayed here for three and a half centuries or something. And in that time, they built a lot, and they established themselves. And in some of the villas, it seems likely that they planted mulberry trees, which were - they would have known from Europe. Actually, a lot of the Roman settlers here - the people, the colonizers - were from all over the place, as they were in the army. They were from Syria, they were from Italy, they were from France, Spain. You know, what was France? Then go. They would have all known around the Mediterranean black mulberry trees, which is what we're living, what we're standing next to next. 

So was this the first one? Well, probably not, because it looks like from an archeological dig that was done where the original London Bridge was built by the Romans, which is a wooden bridge. And there's a church there called the Magnus the Martyr, which was a wharf for importing fruit and vegetables and things for people the Roman, true Roman colonizers living here, and some of that came from quite a way away, and they found mulberry pips in the archeological dig in these archaeological evidence. And the mulberry seeds that we found are either related, or the archeologists have found are either related to religious sites, like their shrines and things like that temples so as part of a ceremony, possibly as fruit. Or as they are as in villas where they would have been used as a garden ornamental, which we know that they did back in Rome. 

Doug Still
So more for the nobility. 

Peter Coles
They would have been, yeah, not the troops. So people often say, “Oh, the troops were given mulberries because they were nutritious, they have medicinal functions,” and so on. But there's no real evidence for that as far as the historians are concerned.

Doug Still  12:05
I’ll take a minute to explain. There are three main species of mulberry trees, red, white and black. There are a number of other minor species worldwide. In his book, Peter describes the big three, like cousins with very different personalities, even though they are from the same family. The red mulberry, Morus rubra, is native to North America and is becoming hard to find in its original form due to the presence and hybridization with the imported white mulberry, Morus alba. The white mulberry, on the other hand, is a world traveler due to humans and our desire for silk over the millennia. The leaves of white mulberry are the most favored food of the moth that produces silk, and both tree and moth originated from China. As Peter states, “No other tree has played a greater role in the economic and cultural prosperity of so many civilizations for so many centuries.” 

The cultivation of silkworms is called sericulture, and the cultivation of mulberry trees, specifically for the silk industry, is called moriculture. Both were spread via the web of old trade routes by land and also by sea across Asia, the Middle East and Europe, known collectively as the Silk Road. It can now be found thriving worldwide. We mostly consider it a weed here in the US, as it grows in empty lots along roadways and anywhere clearings occur. It mixes easily with other mulberries, producing many genetic variations. But the main point for this story is that regarding food for silkworms, Morus alba is numero uno. 

Then there is the black mulberry, Morus nigra, the species we were standing next to. It was originally from Persia, or modern day Iran. It found its way around the Mediterranean world through a variety of ancient civilizations, and as Peter has already explained, the Romans brought it to Britain. But it's not an ecological juggernaut. 

[To Peter] Would the trees have seeded in and naturalized in other places at that time?

Peter Coles  14:11
Black mulberry is kind of odd, really. It has a genetic makeup which is very complex, and it means that it doesn't hybridize. So it won't mix with other trees of any kind, not white mulberries, not nothing. And the genetic variability in black mulberries is astonishingly low. And it was known even to the Romans, who had no microscopes or anything. But they knew that you couldn't breed new varieties of mulberry from a mulberry. So they don't really interbreed in that way, and their seed can be infertile. They have both males and females on the same tree very often. But yes, male and female flowers on the same tree. And these are catkins that look a bit like the catkins of some other species of tree, but they tend to be on different branches and different twigs. And the idea behind that is that they don't actually fertilize themselves. 

Doug Still  15:05
Peter described black mulberry as sort of a loner. You won't find colonies of it in England growing anywhere. It's more of a cultivated tree. And after the Roman period, specimens could be found within the walls of monasteries as fruit trees. When Henry VIII seized and dissolved hundreds of monasteries in the early 16th century in the aftermath of the split from the Catholic Church, the population of black mulberries likely took a hit. 

All that was about the change, represented by the tree we were standing under. We're going to get into all that, but first, I asked Peter to describe the Charlton House mulberry with all its charm and character.

Peter Coles  15:42
Right? Well, there were ways to describe trees, but this tree is not what you sort of think about as a tree, which is a straight, tall trunk with leaves and branches, like branches coming off the sides, and kind of a leafy canopy at the top, which is a classic tree like an oak tree or an elm, or something that an ironwood, or any of these trees that we might be familiar with. This tree sort of looked like that, except it would never have grown very tall, and it would have started to lean over when it was about 80 years old, and it gradually leaned over more and more, and the trunk split. And it split into two trunks that eventually sort of fell apart from each other, and they fell onto the ground.

Doug Still  16:27
Yeah. It looks like two trees. And it's leaning away from each other. 

Peter Coles  16:30
It’s been described in the past as two trees, which, in fact, it’s not. It's one tree which split many, maybe 2, 300 years ago, and it's now growing up as two distinct trees, in a way. Now this is called layering, to anyone who sort of knows a little bit about dendrology, the science of trees and their growth. And it's the way that mulberries like to carry on forever, really. When they get old, they like to lie down. They become less and less willing to stand upright and a bit of an effort. So they lie down, and they start putting out roots from buds that are dormant in the bark and the leaves and the branches, and not in the leaves and the branches of the tree. And they will start to generate branches that will turn into new trunks eventually. And that's what we see happening here, and that's now. They've now fallen apart, and they're growing up independently, like two kind of semi horizontal trees, both of them leaning on a circular fence, metal fence railings, which…

Doug Still  17:32
…and they're propped by the fence. 

Peter Coles  17:36
Yeah, when people have mulberry trees, they tend to know that they lean over and they know that they don't want the tree either to fail or to fall onto a house or to fall onto somebody, so they tend to put props down for them. The interesting growth in this whole tree is a young tree which is no more than what would you call that? Say that was nine inches around, six inches around?

Doug Still  17:58
Or just two and a half inches across.

Peter Coles  18:01
…a two and a half to three inches across diameter tree which is growing sort of bolt upright, right in the middle of the two old trees that are growing away from each other that were possibly one tree.

Doug Still  18:15
The volunteer here described it as a “phoenix.”

Peter Coles  18:18
This is the Phoenix growth, exactly. Now these Phoenix trees - phoenix is the bird that arose from the ashes have been burned with flames and so on - and they came back. So this is a phoenix tree.

Doug Still  18:30
The [black mulberry] leaves are generally broad with a sharp point. They sometimes resemble white mulberry leaves, in that new shoots can occasionally be asymmetrical, with lobes like a fig leaf or glove, but a more reliable way to distinguish black mulberry leaves is by the texture.

Peter Coles  18:47
The leaves are very fine. They're very, they have a shine to them. They're quite thin. They're not hairy, and they can be either small or very big.

Doug Still  18:57
The White mulberry has the glossier leaves.

Peter Coles  19:01
Glossier leaves, and they're thin and quite flimsy, a bit more like lettuce, really, I suppose, some kind of lettuce leaf. So there's a lot of variety in the leaf shape, leaf size. But they all tend to be -  all white mulberries tend to be smooth, and they tend to not have any hairs on the underside. Black mulberry is hairy and rough. If you look at it under my…

Doug Still  19:22
I’m feeling one right now. [Yeah] And the bark is very beautiful, very gnarly and bumpy and full of character. 

Peter Coles  19:29
Yeah, the branch has a slight - the bark has a slight orangey sort of tinge to it. This one's got lichen growing on it, which is a sign that the air is quite clean here. It's an epiphyte. It's something that grows on the bark without doing any damage to it, and otherwise, in the spring, the whole ground area is covered in bluebells and primroses and wild spring flowers, basically,

Doug Still  19:59
Well, one can expect a living being to have a lot of character after 400 years. Which brings me to the tree's origin story. As I said before, this tree is the oldest surviving mulberry in London, and very close to being the oldest in all of England. It dates back to the creation of Charlton House and Gardens built between 1607 and 1612 by a man named Sir Adam Newton. Who was Adam Newton? And if black mulberries were on the decline and only sporadically found, why did he plant one here? 

[theme music]

We're going to take a short break. When we come back, we'll see how the Charlton House mulberry was one of thousands planted during that decade, kicking off a mulberry mania that lasts until this day. I'm Doug still, and you're listening to This Old Tree. 

[music]

Doug Still
Sir Adam Newton is not a huge figure in British history, so when I looked for books or scholarly articles about him, I didn't find any. Probably the leading historian of Newton is a trustee of the Royal Greenwich Heritage Trust, Stella Butler. She has recently tracked down letters of Adam Newton at the British Library, and has pieced together a biography of his life and interests. I had the pleasure of speaking with her about Newton, Charlton House, and the famous mulberry tree. She is also the chair of the Charlton and Blackheath Amateur Horticultural Society, and I asked her how long she had been at the helm.

Dr. Stella Butler  21:48
Well, I've been involved since the end of lockdown, actually. So during 2021 I became involved as a volunteer gardener in what's now known as the old pond garden at Charlton house. And the volunteer program was organized by the Charlton Blackheath Amateur Horticultural Society, which had long met at Charlton house. I mean, for decades and decades it had met, you know, long before the Second World War. So there was a very close association between the Horticultural Society and Charlton house. So having joined the volunteer scheme, I joined the Horticultural Society and became a member of the committee, and then was elected Chair of the society.

Doug Still  22:44
Well, I had the pleasure of seeing the gardens at Charlton House, and they're spectacular. I got some incredible pictures. Really great work.

Dr. Stella Butler  22:53
Well, we're very, very proud of them. And we had a wonderful accolade this year of receiving the judges award in the London In Bloom competition. So it was a real, a real treat, real, real thrill for us all to have that kind of stamp of approval.

Doug Still  23:14
Congratulations. So you began researching Sir Adam Newton, the original owner of Charlton House. There isn't really that much written about him, is there? 

Dr. Stella Butler  23:26
No, we particularly don't really know very much about his early life. We know that he came from Scotland. He was Scottish, although he spent some time as a young man in Paris, but we don't know very much about his background at all. What we do know for certain is that in 1599 he became a tutor to Prince Henry, who was the eldest son of James VI of Scotland.

Doug Still  24:02
And that was IN Scotland, correct?

Dr. Stella Butler  24:06
It was, the prince then lived at Stirling Castle. But when his father, the prince's father, James the sixth of Scotland, succeeded Elizabeth, the first to the English throne. They all moved south, including Adam Newton. Adam Newton was confirmed as a member of the Prince of Wales household, and he moved down with the prince in 1603 a couple of years later. He married a young woman called Katherine Puckering. Catherine came with a very rich dowry, lots and lots of money, and with that money, Adam Newton bought Charlton - the manor of Charlton.

Doug Still  24:57
Where did the Puckering family live? 

Dr. Stella Butler  25:00
The Puckering family, Catherine's father was a member of the court of Elizabeth I, and he looked after Elizabeth I’s money. And while doing that, he managed to acquire lots of estates for himself.

Doug Still  25:21
Funny how that works! [laughter]

Dr. Stella Butler  25:26
But he lived principally at Warwick Priory. So in Warwickshire - they all had houses in London as well - but his country estate was in Warwickshire. 

Doug Still
So he was a powerful man. 

Dr. Stella Butler
He was, indeed, yes.

Doug Still  25:43
Was Newton a favorite of the king, and was he already wealthy before he married into the Puckering family?

Dr. Stella Butler  25:49
Um, he certainly wasn't wealthy. Um, the money that he had came from the Puckerings. I think that that is fairly clear. Whether he was actually a favorite of the king, we don't know. I think what we can say is that he was very well thought of because he was confirmed in the household of the Prince of Wales, and by then, the Prince of Wales, by the late 1600s you know, 1607 or 1608, the prince has really grown up. He's in his mid to late teens, and Adam Newton is still a member of his household. So I think we can see that Adam moves from being, he gets promoted, if you like, from being a tutor to being a very senior courtier in in the household of the prince who has now become the Prince of Wales.

Doug Still  26:54
This is Prince Henry…

Dr. Stella Butler
That's right, Prince Henry. 

Doug Still
…and so after he marries Catherine Puckering, they build the house at Charlton, the Charlton House.

Dr. Stella Butler  27:05
They do, and the Charlton house, Charlton house is a very grand house. It's not huge, but it is very grand. It's very modern as well. It's quite clearly Jacobean in style. It was designed, probably by John Thorpe, who was a surveyor. It's actually an architect in the Estate Department of the royal household. So John Thorpe was involved in lots of other royal buildings, Somerset House, for example, and [?]. We know that because we don't have any actual plans from the time of its building, which was between 1607 and 1612, we're not absolutely certain. The uncertainty was added to because John Evelyn, the famous diarist, actually said that he thought the, well, he actually wrote that the architect was Inigo Jones. I suspect it probably was John Thorpe actually, rather than Inigo Jones. But either way, the house came out of the Royal Estate Department. So it's effectively part of the Royal Estate, although quite clearly owned by Adam Newton. 

Doug Still  28:30
How does that work? So he built the house. Was there money contributed from the crown? 

Dr. Stella Butler  28:37
He was in the pay of the court of James I. So yes, he was receiving his own money as well. He'd received various lands through royal patronage as well [I see]. But also, within the house -  what is clear within the house is that there are lots of motifs of the Prince of Wales. So it's absolutely clear throughout the house that this is intended as a residence where the Prince of Wales would feel comfortable, and that is fit for a prince. And of course, it's up the hill from where his mum was living, down in Queen's House at Greenwich as well.

Doug Still  29:31
So the prince would have come to the house. 

Dr. Stella Butler  29:35
If he'd lived, he would have come to the house. Unfortunately, Henry, Prince of Wales died in 1612, three months short of his 19th birthday. So unfortunately, although it was built for Henry, Henry's tutor, Henry's courtier, unfortunately Henry didn't get to live, to enjoy the house and its surroundings,

Doug Still  30:04
Any evidence that the king himself visited the house?

Dr. Stella Butler  30:09
No, we don't have that. I mean, it is possible that he did, but we don't know. Certainly Charles, James I’s son who became, who succeeded his brother as Prince of Wales, would have visited the house, because Adam Newton became Receiver General in Charles's household. So Adam had the stature, if you like, by that time, to be retained as a royal courtier. So he did very well indeed.

Doug Still  30:52
Quite a change in history. He became Charles I, but it would have been Henry IX? What if Henry had lived?

Dr. Stella Butler  31:01
Yeah, that's right, it would have been Henry the Ninth, yeah. 

Doug Still
I see, instead of which, it was Charles the First? 

Dr. Stella Butler
Yeah, you're right. Well, I can say that it's probably worth mentioning that when Charles came to the throne, Adam Newton was, in 1625, Adam Newton was, I mean, he was an elderly man by then, but still alive. So for the first five years of Charles' reign, Adam Newton was still at Charlton house, and may well have received the king as Charles I, but probably wouldn't have done James I, because he wasn't part of -  Adam Newton wasn't part of James' immediate household.

Doug Still  31:50
Well, it seems to me, the house was built to receive the royal party - the grand salon, and that sort of thing. 

Dr. Stella Butler  31:58
It is very much part of the royal network, I think that's what one can say. And one of the houses that the royal family and their entourage would have visited, yes.

Doug Still  32:13
Who designed the landscape and gardens?

Dr. Stella Butler  32:17
That we don’t know. The immediate landscaping work was probably done out of the same drawing office as the house. So it was probably laid out by John Thorpe, or possibly by Inigo Jones, but I think probably by John Thorpe.

Doug Still  32:35
How would you describe the original plan?

Dr. Stella Butler  32:39
I think they would have had a very Jacobean plan. So there will have been an axial path, a straight path up to the front door. It's not that far from a road. So it's not a winding country path at all. It's very much a straight path, I think. There would have been rectangular beds, and then there will probably have been kind of walks leading out into the wider parkland, which probably had trees added to it as well.

Doug Still  33:17
So symmetrical in design for the most part?

Dr. Stella Butler  33:21
Yes. Lots of straight lines. I think, though, there will have been lots of, probably low hedging in the Jacobean period, it's very much following on from that Tudor period, where what you get are square boxes or rectangular boxes and straight lines, really.

Doug Still  33:44
So how did a black mulberry tree fit into this very ordered, formal landscape? Well, it turns out there wasn't just one. There was an entire orchard of them within the grounds on the left side of the house. Why? What was going on? Peter Cowles explains that it all had to do with King James I and his master plan to bring the silk industry across the channel to England.

Peter Coles  34:09
Anyway, he came to the throne in 1604 and quite soon after that, he had this idea of building up a silk industry.

Doug Still  34:19
What was his plan?

Peter Coles  34:22
Okay, you have to take a broad - you have to zoom out a little bit, and you have to take in France and Spain and Italy, the other places that were actually on his horizon. And Italy, France and Spain all had thriving silk industries. They were producing silk rather than importing the fiber from Italy. That's not entirely true. They were producing silk, and they were importing thread from China and weaving their own silk, but they were also raising silk worms to spin silk that they would turn into thread that they would then have an independent source of the original fiber for their silk industries. And we didn't have that. That's a big advantage. Yeah, we were net importers of the whole thing. Not only had we to import the thread, but at one point we imported the silk as well. 

Doug Still
And silk was highly valued. 

Peter Coles
Worth its weight in gold. It was very transportable, and it was highly desirable, and it was in short supply. So silk - the secret of how silk was produced, was guarded by the Chinese for years. And I won't go into all the finer details of that, but that secret finally escaped. And so it was known that silk came from a silk moth that had a larval stage that spun a cocoon, and that cocoon, if unraveled, would produce something like a kilometer of silk thread, and you could then de-gum it and process it and turn it into fibers that you could then weave into silk. The Italians had a head start in terms of European countries and then the Spanish actually, but then the French. 

And at the time of James I, to come back to your question, France was led by Henri IV. And Henri IV really wanted to give a real boost to the their home grown silk industry, because they were also dependent on Italian and Spanish silk threads. So he and his agronomist advisor called Olivier de Serres recommended planting 1000s and 1000s of mulberry trees to feed 1000s and 1000s of silk worms, to produce kilometers and kilometers of silk thread and then be independent of China and things. There were also problems with the supply chain from China at the time. There had been banditry on the roots and things that meant that various things had not happened. So the supply chain was threatened anyway. So an alternative reason for wanting to have it, James wanted to copy Henri. [I see] Yeah, he copied him, basically. 

Doug Still  36:55
Who do you think was advising him?

Peter Coles  36:57
Well, there was somebody called William Stallenge, and exactly what his relationship with France was, I don't know, but he seems to have been aware of some of the publications, both of Olivier de Serres and also some of the people that de Serres had used in terms of how to grow mulberry trees and how to look after silkworms. But William Stallenge was - he's down in the records as being a customs officer. But it sounds like somebody with a peak cap in Calais or…

Doug Still
Right a clipboard [both laugh] 

Peter Coles
… the port of New York or something, but he wasn't that. He was actually somebody who had the right to patents on importation of goods, which is a very lucrative thing to do, which meant that you had the sole monopoly over the import and the taxes due on certain kinds of… 

Doug Still
A powerful man. 

Peter Coles
…so he was a powerful man within the court. And James thought, well, here's the guy who he trusts with this particular patent. And he had a French colleague called Francois de Verton, Sire de la Foret, which means seen kind of, what's it called, sire of the forest. And he and William Stallenge got the patent on importing mulberry trees and then sort of forcing, with one arm up behind your back, the aristocrats land that landowners basically to plant a few 1000 mulberry trees on their grounds and to find out how to raise silk worms to get the eggs and to hatch them and to go. 

Doug Still  38:23
So this would have been a natural place to have a small orchard of mulberries, because this would have been [yeah] - the king was responsible for building this house. Lot of ground…

Peter Coles  38:33
The king was responsible for building it. Exactly the right period. 

Doug Still  38:37
William Stallenge, the Plymouth born merchant and customs official for the king was key to making all this happen. Peter Coles writes that Stallenge oversaw the publication of a book in 1607 called “The Perfect Use of Silkworms and Their Benefit,” which was written by Oliver de Serres and translated by Nicholas Geff. It was a sales pitch that forecast great profits if the industry were embraced correctly. King James was on board. He soon had 10,000 mulberry plants ordered and strongly urged the landowning ability to get on board and plant them. To set an example, James set aside four acres of land for mulberry trees within the grounds of St James Palace, which now corresponds to a corner of the garden behind today's Buckingham Palace. Sir Adam Newton was no different than anyone else in the king’s sphere. The garden at Charlton house was to have mulberry trees. I asked Stella about it. 

So let's get to the mulberry orchard. Have you found any mentions of the mulberry orchard in the documentary evidence that was planted at this time?

Dr. Stella Butler  39:44
Not in Adam Newton's letters themselves. The letters that survive are correspondence between Adam Newton and Thomas Puckering, who was Catherine’s brother, so Adam Newton's brother in law. They do correspond about trees. Unfortunately, they don't correspond about mulberry trees. However, we do know from other sources that Adam joined in to James I’s project to establish a silk industry. And we know that Adam Newton bought, probably, I think he had to pay for them. But he bought from James, probably about 100 trees to plant in a group at the house, and we know that that one of the mulberry trees survives.

Doug Still  40:48
And that's the one that we know today. 

Dr. Stella Butler  40:52
It is,yes, that is much cherished and looked after by the volunteer gardeners at Charlton House. 

Doug Still  41:00
So, as a member of the king's court, he really didn't have much choice in planting this mulberry orchard, right? I mean, it was kind of expected.

Dr. Stella Butler  41:09
I think it probably was, particularly because he was building a new house. I suspect that others may have been less enthusiastic if they were having to find space in established gardens. But Adam Newton, it was a perfect time for him, because the house was built and the landscape ‘round it was developed between 1607 and 1612. So it's just at this period that James is trying to get a silk industry going, and it's just at the time that he's pushing these mulberry trees. 

What we do know from the correspondence between Thomas Puckering and Adam Newton is that Adam liked trees. I mean, not only did he like trees, he was fairly knowledgeable about them as well. And by that, I mean he knew he had experience of planting trees, of importing trees, of moving trees from one estate to another. The letters that we have between him and Thomas date between 1613 and 1617, and in one of them, in one set of letters, it's about Thomas, the younger man, was on his grand tour of Europe, and actually sent trees back to Adam Newton from Naples. So we have some correspondence about that. And then in 1617, we have correspondence about trees that are being dug up from Charlton House and transported to Warwick Priory, the Puckering estates in Warwickshire.

[theme music]

Doug Still  43:05
So James I led the way to sericultural prosperity, and England was forever known as a hub for silk thread and fabrics, right? It didn't really work out that way. After a short break, we'll find out what happened. This is This Old Tree. 

[music]

Despite the gargantuan effort, the silk production was not what the king, or anyone had hoped for.

Peter Coles  43:51
So what happened with James I and his mulberry trees is that it’s always said that he planted the wrong mulberries - the black mulberries rather than the white mulberries - in full knowledge at the time that the white mulberry was preferred. But nobody said you couldn't feed silkworms on black mulberries.

Doug Still  44:09
Fingers point to William Stallenge for making the fateful decision to purchase and plant black mulberries en masse. De Serres clearly stated that white mulberry was the best for silkworms, and Italy, France and Spain successfully employed the white. But De Serres didn't rule out black mulberry altogether either, and Stallenge listened. In hindsight, it was a big failure, but one can see Stallenge's logic. Black mulberries had already proved capable of withstanding the colder, wetter British climate.

Peter Coles  44:41
And the thinking was probably the black mulberry is hardier. It's got thicker leaves, and was more likely to resist the bad weather here than the white mulberry trees, which are really - they thrive in Italy in places where it gets quite hot, really, and definitely the winters are not severe. And here we were going through what's known as the Little Ice Age at the time in that particular part of the time for the next, for another 200 years. The Thames River froze over, and you could actually, there were people who were barbecuing meat and things on, you know, bonfires on the Thames. There were stalls there. People were skating on the Thames. And Elizabeth first actually went skating on the Thames at one point. So this whole thing was going [unintelligle]. 

So what happens when you get very hard winters? It could kill trees. It might kill white mulberry trees. It doesn't seem to have killed black mulberry trees, but what it does do is delay the coming into leaf of the tree, because they come into leaf, obviously, when the temperature reaches a certain point. So anyone who's grown silk worms will know that you have to hatch the eggs at the time when the leaves are just coming out, when the buds are just opening. Yes, so you have to get the timing right so the silkworms hatch at the same time as the leaves first come out. And if you have a very hard or late, long winter and a late spring, there's a chance, because you can actually bring on and incubate the eggs of the silk moth so they hatch at a certain time. And if you get that wrong, then you've got the nothing to feed them on, right? So the chances are that that failed, and it failed in those critical first years where nobody knew how to raise silkworms anyway. 

Two things happened with James. The first is that the colonies in Virginia were just being, I suppose, populated, colonized, and there was…

Doug Still  46:41
So he thought, llet's put the white mulberries over there!

Peter Coles  46:43
…let’s put the white mulberries over there. And you can do two things. When you do that, it's a better climate. So you've got a you know, and you've got a labor force. There were slaves coming over again, along with everything else. You've got the space for it, the climate's right, and so on. But also you've got another thing. James I hated tobacco. He hated smoking, and he even wrote a book about it. So Virginia was known for its tobacco, so he said, let's pull up all these nasty tobacco plants and let's put silk let's put mulberry trees in and we'll grow mulberry leaves for feeding silk worms, and we'll have a silk industry over there, and it took a while to get established, but it did, actually, in the end, work. So they planted white mulberries, after a little experiment with black mulberries, a little experiment with the native red Mulberry, and it didn't work, so they settled on the white mulberry. It took about 100 years before - in Virginia, but much more in Georgia and then some of the southern states -  the silk industry grew up on a very viable commercial scale. For a while…

Doug Still  47:50
I see. So as Americans, we have James I to thank for the white mulberry escaping into our landscape.

Peter Coles  47:58
Yeah, which is a new kind of weed, which is killing off your native red Mulberry, right? And hybridizing with it.

Doug Still  48:05
The silkworms weren't happy, and little silk was being produced. The endeavor failed, but 1000s of black mulberry trees were planted across the realm. Now, what? I asked about Charlton House specifically, and Adam Newton. 

How long did the mulberry orchard remain? What happened to it?

Dr. Stella Butler  48:25
That we don't know for sure, but what we do know is, in the following century, later owners took out a lot of the trees. I mean, this was probably partly because of changing fashion, they wanted a more open aspect of the garden. But also it may well have been that some of the older trees, not just the mulberries, but some of the other trees that were planted, probably by then, had seen better days and needed to be removed.

Doug Still  49:04
How long did that family stay at Charlton house?

Dr. Stella Butler  49:08
Adam died in 1630 his estate was inherited by his son, Henry, who was then only 12. Henry married in the late 1630’s while he was still a very young man, and in the 1640’s became involved in the Civil War on the Royalist side. So he was on the wrong side for that war. [Yeah] Suffered terribly, particularly financially, and the money that they lost, he and his wife lost during the Civil War during the late 1640’s meant that in the 1650’s they were forced to sell Charlton House. And they left and went to Warwick Priory. They went to the Puckering estates, which Henry had inherited shortly before then.

Doug Still
It was the end of an era. 

Dr. Stella Butler
It was indeed, yes. I mean, it was the end of that very close relationship with the royal family. 

Doug Still  50:21
But landowners didn't cut them all down, nor did they want to. There was one serendipitous benefit to all of those new black mulberry trees in the first decades of the 17th century, something to be thankful for. I'm told that the black mulberry fruit is absolutely delicious.

Peter Coles  50:39
So, a lot of the fruit on the white Mulberry, Morus alba, is a dark purpley, black color. And it is also very nice to eat and nice to flavor things with. And a lot of people think that that is a black mulberry they're eating. Until you've eaten the black mulberry from Morus nigra, then you know the difference. Yeah.

Doug Still  51:00
You feel that the fruit on black mulberry just tastes better.

Peter Coles  51:05
Oh, it's definitely different. Yeah, no, the white mulberry tends to have a little stalk on the fruit, which makes it easier to pick. It's also quite firm, so it will come off in your hand. A black mulberry grows closer to the axial where the leaf joins the twig, and it doesn't have a particularly noticeable stalk. There is one there, but it's very short, so you've got to grab the berry. The berries are very fragile. Shakespeare talks about this, and they will fall apart in your hand very often, and the juice will run up your wrist. They're so juicy and so fragile, and so they fall about so much, fall apart so quickly that you have to eat them straight from the tree.

Doug Still  51:47
That's not what it means to be caught red handed, is it? 

Peter Coles  51:51
That's what people say. And I have a colleague who is a tree expert, and he tells - when he gives guided walks - he tells people that.

Doug Still  51:57
While I was roaming about Charlton House, I happened to meet one of the enthusiastic, hard working volunteers that make the garden so enjoyable to visit. Her name is Kathy Aitken, and she brought in another gentleman by the name of Jason Sylvan. I learned about what they do and how they care for the old mulberry tree.

Kathy Aitken  52:16
My name is Kathy Aitken.

Jason Sylvan
And Jason Sylvan

Doug Still  52:19
Jason, are you - you're a full time employee here?

Jason Sylvan  52:24
I am a part time contracted head gardener. I did start off, though, as a volunteer as part of the same scheme, and have elevated my status up beyond these mere volunteers. [laughter]

Kathy Aitken  52:36
Jason is now in charge of the volunteers.

Doug Still  52:38
And how long have the volunteers been working here at Charlton House?

Kathy Aitken  52:42
So we started in 2020, in February. So it was just before COVID, and we had about three sessions, and COVID locked us down.

Doug Still  52:51
I see. It must have been nice to work outside during COVID.

Kathy Aitken  52:55
Well, as soon as the lockdown lifted, it was absolutely brilliant. It started in the walled gardens. That's all we were looking after, to begin with. It was meant to be just a bit of light weeding, but then, after lockdown, we then met Jason. Jason joined the volunteers, and he had already done a garden design, which was just fabulous. And all the amateur horticultural volunteers just just went with it, which involved a lot more than just weeding. It actually meant taking it back practically to ground zero and starting again. 

Doug Still  53:30
What was the condition of the tree when you first started here?

Kathy Aitken  53:34
The tree was not part of the volunteer scheme to begin with. So, once we got to grips with the walled gardens, we then saw the state of the wonderful mulberry tree. And it was fine, but it was covered in brambles and alconet. And I know from my own experience, I have a mulberry. We have a very baby mulberry, he's only 30 years old. But they do seem to hate things with long tap roots at their base. 

Doug Still  54:00
So you removed the weeds. Was there any pruning that needed to be done?

Jason Sylvan  54:04
Light pruning. Yeah, not too much to the main, main structure, but where there's anything that's been snapped off, because obviously this is public thoroughfare, anyone and everyone will forage from it. Sometimes they're not as careful as other people, and they might just bend a branch down. It snaps and it's just left dangling. So things like that will - it's an obvious one that you need to tidy up in terms of sort of pruning for health. 

Kathy Aitken  54:30
One big branch that was dead, one big branch.

Jason Sylvan  54:31
That was dead, yeah. But I mean, generally speaking, it's sort of on its own steam. And, I mean, yeah, we just kind of let it get on with itself, pretty much, don't we, because it's managing. [Yeah]  

Doug Still  54:44
Well, it's been here for 400 years, yes, so it probably knows what to do. [laughter]

Jason Sylvan  54:48
Yeah. By this point, it sort of figured it out, yeah.  

Doug Still  54:51
But of course, the conversation swung back to the tasty fruit. 

Why are black mulberries important to to you?  

Kathy Aitken  54:58
The fruit. It makes very wonderful mulberry mulberry vodka. 

Doug Still  55:06
Mulberry vodka! I wasn't going to guess that.

Kathy Aitken  55:09
Even my little 30 year old one produces enough for mulberry vodka. But I know this one they have. The Frilly’s Cafe have actually foraged a few and made mulberry jam. So that's very nice.

Doug Still  55:21
Do you harvest the mulberries off this tree?

Jason Sylvan  55:24
No, the public and birds tend to get most of them, and that's fine. It's a public tree at this stage, you know. So everyone's going to take from it, and it does seem to provide it. Have you tasted them yourself? 

Doug Still
Mulberries? No.

Kathy Aitken  55:39
No, because you can't buy them in green grocers, because they don't, they don't last. Yeah. So if you want to taste mulberries, you have to grow a mulberry. 

Jason Sylvan  55:47
So they are a bit of an acquired taste, like they are unusual, and I don't think everyone likes them.

Kathy Aitken  55:53
The look puts you off, because they don’t look very nice. But if you put them in then they sort of explode in your the mouth. It's lovely. 

Jason Sylvan
They do have this other taste that's a bit 

Kathy Aitken
…try them in vodka. [laughter]

Doug Still  56:02
Can you make a pie for mulberry fruit?

Kathy Aitken  56:04
I imagine you can. I never have tried, but maybe this year, that's something if we are a bit bored with vodka. So we'll try a pie.

Doug Still  56:10
I didn't know if you can get enough, but this one seems to be covered in them.

Kathy Aitken  56:14
It will drop quite a lot of them.

Jason Sylvan  56:17
We have seen people climbing up it like, like monkeys before. So they're really eager to get them. And I think a lot of the public sort of know, and they're - you see people walking past it and looking, eyeing it kind of, you know, in a like, “Are we going to get them first?” kind of thing. And they're just waiting for the first day when they start to become ripe. So it is known, and becoming, you know, more known every year as a prime foraging spot. 

Kathy Aitken  56:43
What I think is lovely too, is because theTrust that owns the property is trying to, you know, improve the house and get more footfall, to find this gem in the middle of Central London, really. And the mulberry is a big draw to the public to come and see it, because it's such a special tree.

Doug Still  56:58
Why is this mulberry important to you?

Jason Sylvan  57:02
Probably because it is so significant. I mean, we're adding to it now because of that importance. So we have, you already mentioned, we've planted another mulberry in the opposite corner of the estate. And the Greenwich Council grounds team who look after some of the site, lost one of their team. I don't know how they died, but they lost a member of their team, and so they planted another mulberry in the other corner of the site. So we have a commemorative one, one that we've put for our generation as part of that, our team, and this existing one. So you've got these three different sort of historical reasons why they are here.

Doug Still  57:42
Thank you so much for speaking with me today. I feel like I got lucky to meet you.

Jason Sylvan and Kathy Aitken
You are more than welcome. 

Doug Still
I asked Stella a similar question. 

What does this historic tree make you think about when you're on site at Charlton House?

Dr. Stella Butler  57:55
I think it makes me think about the beginnings of the house. I think as much as those motifs of the Prince of Wales, the three feathers in the house. I think the mulberry tree represents that direct relationship with Adam Newton and with the Royal Court. So that's what it makes me think.

Doug Still  58:24
Well, thanks so much for joining me today. That was really enlightening, and I learned a lot.

Dr. Stella Butler  58:30
Well, it's an absolute pleasure.

Doug Still  58:31
Thanks very much. 

And lastly, Peter Coles.

Peter Coles  58:35
It’s a great tree of the British Isles. It's one of the great trees, and it's partly because it's in an urban area and it's very old. So I would say those two things really are important. Any old tree that's growing within an urban area has survived generations and centuries of decline and renewal and so on, and seeing kings and queens come and go, seeing plagues come and go, and wars come and go. So they have a heritage value beyond their natural beauty. 

Doug Still  59:05
Well Peter, thanks so much for joining me on this beautiful day under the Charlton House Mulberry, and talking about the history of mulberries industry in particular.

Peter Coles  59:15
Well, thank you for your interest. It's been a pleasure to share what I know or some of what I know about the species that I have probably an unnatural fascination with. And there's so much more to know. Thank you so much.

Doug Still  59:34
It appears black mulberry juice runs deep in British culture. I've learned that King James I had a lot to do with that, only not in the way he planned. Moriculture is the term for the cultivation of mulberry trees for the purpose of creating silk. But that word doesn't seem right anymore. In this case, mulberries are grown for their beauty, their fruit and for their own sake. I've coined a new term, “mulbiculture.” I wonder if it will stick. Regardless, it's truly special that the Charlton House mulberry tree is a living remnant of a pivotal time in British history and a witness to all that has happened since. 

[music]

Doug Still  1:00:26
Thank you tree lovers for joining me today. Many, many thanks to my new friends and fellow mulbiculturalists Peter Coles, Dr. Stella Butler, Kathy Aitken, and Jason Sylvan for helping to tell the story. The music today was performed by an early music group out of Boston called the Renaissonics. Thank you to John Tyson for sharing it. The show's theme music is by Dee Lee and artwork by Dan Hiunii. I'll post pictures of the mulberry tree at Charlton house and gardens on Facebook and Instagram. The show website is this old tree dot show where you can also find a transcript for this episode. 

I'm Doug still and you've been listening to This Old Tree. See you next time!

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