MULBERRY by Peter Coles

Reaktion Books, £16 ISBN 978-1789141429

A short but incredibly fact-packed book that traces the history of this most historically and economically important of trees.

Reviewer Ambra Edwards is a writer and garden historian.

The mulberry tree and the silkworms that feed on its leaves are, explains Peter Coles, indivisible – it is silk that has driven the mulberry’s spread across the globe. Much of the book is thus given over to a history of sericulture, the production of silk. Following it is like trying to unravel a thread tangled at the bottom of the sewing box; a thread, moreover, randomly cut by wars or religious persecution. Eventually we arrive in 17th-century Britain, and James I’s doomed attempt to set up a British silk industry, which failed, the story goes, because James mistakenly introduced the black mulberry, Morus nigra, instead of the white, Morus alba. (The distinction is based on the colour of the buds, not the fruit.) Coles argues this is untrue: silk has been produced from black mulberries for millennia, notably in India, albeit a coarser, heavier silk than that of the white. The difficulty with sericulture is that the tiny silkworm larvae can only feed on the most tender young leaves, so the trick is to bring the two lifecycles into sync. And this would have been tricky in Jacobean Britain, just entering the Little Ice Age.

Coles pursues the mulberry through legend, art and literature, from ancient

Chinese myths to Instagram, before a fascinating final chapter explores the many uses of the ‘Tree of Plenty’. The oldest known woodblock print was made on mulberry paper, while Marco Polo marvelled at its use in China for paper money. Both the Roman Empire and native Americans enjoyed the fruit, while all parts of the tree have medicinal value, from traditional Chinese remedies to modern treatments for type 2 diabetes.

The latest in the excellent Reaktion series on the cultural history of plants, Mulberry is perhaps slightly less engaging than some earlier studies, but offers a comprehensively researched and wide-ranging introduction to the subject.