Mulberries by the gate

Suddenly they are there. Mulberries, turned from green lumps on the stems to fat globules of deep crimson, sweet and juicy. Years ago, I planted a mulberry tree near my back gate, where people passing by in the park would one day be able to stop and graze if they chose and kids in search of mulberry leaves for boxes of silkworms would have easy pickings. The tree is a daughter of the one my neighbour cultivates on the road verge opposite the front of my house.

"Mulberries," I would hear people say as they walked past my neighbour’s tree with their dogs heading down the road. They stopped and ate.

I stopped and ate too, grazing as I walked past, or deliberately crossing the road for sweetness. My fingers stained blood red, fading to bruised purple. It blackened around my nails. It comes off easily enough if washed quickly. Unripe mulberries will also take the stain away, if rubbed into the dark stain. I wondered that the birds didn't eat all the fruit. The parrots and crows had a go, but there was such abundance there was enough for all.

One day when my neighbour was pruning the tree, I took a cutting, shoved it in a pot of compost and hoped for the best. It grew and I planted the daughter tree by the back gate. I shovelled more compost and waited for her to grow and fruit. And now she does. A tall tree that arcs across the gateway. I cut back branches and take them down to my horses, who love them. Quickly the branches grow back. Repeat and repeat again.

The best mulberry tree I know grows in the backyard of my friend Jennine. Years ago, when her kids and mine were small, she and her husband escaped suburbia and bought an acre in the hills, with a wild garden full of fruit trees and weeds. Jennine rang me soon after she moved. "You have to come and see my mulberry tree," she said. I dressed the kids in old clothes and we headed up the hill.

The tree was huge and old, gnarled, with branches spreading wide and low. We pushed our way through the outer leaves into a mulberry tree cubby house, completely enclosed in mulberry leaf walls, a red-black carpet of fallen berries across the ground. It stained the soles of our bare feet. We filled buckets with the fat berries and ate almost as many, our lips turning lusciously red. We worked and ate industriously for a time, but it ended with the kids throwing mulberries at each other. They looked bruised, covered in the blood red juice. We headed home with our buckets. I made mulberry jam and mulberry syrup. We poured the syrup over pancakes and used it as cordial. It was delicious and I vowed to one day have a mulberry tree just as productive and delicious so I could make litres of the stuff to last all year around. Hence the tree by my back gate.

Sometimes I notice people picking berries from it but only rarely have I seen someone picking leaves for silkworms. Do kids still have silkworms?

My son was given a box of tiny silkworms when he was in kindergarten, long before I planted my tree by my back gate, even before my neighbour planted my tree's mother on her verge. Jennine's tree was an hour away – too far for regular trips to collect mulberry leaves for our silkworms. We cruised the neighbourhood's back lanes looking for the distinctive bright green, heart-shaped leaves, their deep serrated edges a tell-tale sign. We became adept at noticing them and I had a map in my head of every mulberry tree that overhung footpaths and back lanes in the local suburbs, and a couple a distance away on regularly driven routes. Once every couple of days we would raid a tree, pulling a few small branches and leaves to feed the silkworms. We would hear them munching in the quiet of night, eating constantly, until they were huge and fat. Then they'd spin their pale creamy-yellow cocoons, globules of pure silk.

To harvest silk, the pupating moth must be killed and the long single thread unwound from the cocoon. We let ours hatch, watched them drill holes in the end of their silken shrouds and emerge as flightless, fluttering white moths; silkworms are moth larvae, not worms at all. Over thousands of years of breeding the silk moth has lost its ability to fly, convenient trait for the silk farms of Asia and the shoe-box silkworm farm in our kitchen.

Our silk moths fluttered around their shoebox, the wide-bodied females and thinner males finding each other and joining in conjugal bliss. The females deposited their creamy fawn eggs in little clusters on the sides of the box, then died. I cut the patches of egg-containing cardboard from the box and kept them in a jar. The rest of it – dead moths, dried mulberry sticks, musty shoebox, and a scattering of already-decomposing silkworm poo – I put in the compost bin.

We saved a few cocoons and tried to pull off the silken thread, but when moths have been allowed to emerge, the exit hole breaks the thread, so the silk comes off in short pieces, each a few centimetres long. If unwound in a single filament, the silk from one cocoon may be a kilometre or more long. I imagine the tedium of trying to do this by hand. And the colossal effort of the silkworm to spin all that silk. Apparently it takes 3000 silkworms consuming 104 kilograms of mulberry leaves to make one kilogram of silk, but I suppose a kilogram of silk is quite a lot of silk.

The first year we saved silkworm eggs, we came home from holidays the following spring to find dead grubs all over the top of my son's chest of drawers. The long-forgotten eggs had hatched while we were away and the tiny worms, black and half a centimetre long, had no food. There were some eggs still unhatched so we scoured the neighbourhood for mulberry leaves and the process began again. We had silkworms for years, trading a few eggs with others each year to prevent too much inbreeding and throwing some worms to the chooks to be protein rich snacks, lest we end up with thousands of silkworms.

The constant search for leaves was a motivation in growing a mulberry tree but even by the time I planted my tree, my kids’ silkworm years were past. Still, I’m glad to have it there, getting in the way as I walk through the gate, reminding me that spring is here, and tempting me to sweet berries and stained fingers.

Thanks for reading,

Jill