Tarrying in the mulberry shade

On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.

- Isabel Bannerman

There I found him, lips and fingers bloodied, scrumping the bulbous goodies that hang darkly sticky under the heart-shaped leaves.

The fruit of the morus come in three colours: white from India and China, black from the Armenian highlands and red from the midwestern US. Morus alba, cultivated for 5,000 years in the Far East, are fast-growing with translucent lettuce-y leaves, the favoured food of silkworms.

M. nigra, the most prevalent mulberry in gardens today, are the longest living (they look ancient at an early age) and, to my way of thinking, the most compelling, bearing in August bushels of juicy 'drupes'—for they are not fruits, but hard seeds encased in pulpy flesh, around a pithy cortex.