We visited the Thomas Gainsborough House in Sudbury the other day. As well as the gallery it has a lovely old garden, once an orchard, with three fruiting trees of great character: a quince, a medlar and, best of all, a magnificent black mulberry whose mighty limbs have been bent down under the weight of years and now rest their elbows on the ground around the main trunk. This mulberry is over 400 years old, so would already have been well established in the 1730s when the future artist Thomas Gainsborough played in the garden as a child. It was one of many thousands imported into Britain by James the First in 1607 to try and establish a silk industry in this country to match that in China.  

As everyone knows, silk comes from the silk moth whose caterpillars (silkworms) feed on mulberry leaves and then spin a wondrous cocoon of silken thread to surround the pupa before it finally metamorphoses into the adult moth, Bombyx mori.  This raw silk has such special properties of lustre and softness that it became highly prized as a luxury fabric.  Hence the ancient craft of sericulture – silk manufacture from domesticated silkworms – that had been practised in China for several thousand years but whose techniques remained a closely guarded secret until, the story goes, Christian monks smuggled some silkworms out of China in a hollow stick around AD550 and presented them to the Roman Emperor Justinian in Constantinople.  An early intellectual property theft!  The ‘Silk Roads’ from China later became a major trade route to the West, exporting huge quantities of silk and other natural products.  No wonder King James wanted some of the action. But he made one big mistake.  The trees he imported were all black mulberries (Morus nigra), but any naturalist could have told him that silkworms only feed on the white mulberry (Morus alba), a quite different species, native to China.  Well, at least the black ones produced nice jam.

As it happens, Sudbury did later become – and still is – a major centre for silk production in England, though all the silk has to be imported.  The black mulberry itself entered English culture in a quite different way, through the nursery rhyme ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush’ in which children are encouraged to get themselves up, washed, dressed and ready for school ‘on a cold and frosty morning’.  The lyrics have dubious origins, but maybe here too there’s a mistake a naturalist could have picked up.  Could the composer actually have meant a ‘blackberry bush’?  Both brambles and mulberries have juicy black fruit, but mulberries only grow on trees not bushes. Hmm.

Jeremy Mynott
5 November 2024

Autumn is the most ambiguous season.  You know where you are with winter’s bare and chilly landscapes, spring bright with blossom and bird song, and summer’s rich abundance.  Autumn seems a more in-between season, harder to define exactly, but it has its own subtler qualities.  Think of the slanting light on the fields, the wistful autumn song of the robin, swallows lingering on the wires before departure and the rusty hues of the falling leaves.  If you’re feeling at all elegiac, autumn looks back with nostalgia and forward with apprehension.  November in particular is no one’s favourite month, as Thomas Hood described in what must be the gloomiest poem in the English language:

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member –
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds –
November

He should have got out more, though.  Far enough, at any rate, to look at an ivy-covered wall on a sunny autumn day, as I’ve just been doing.  It was literally humming with insect life, all attracted by the nectar and pollen in the ivy’s late flowerings.  There were red admiral butterflies, sucking up the reserves of energy they’ll need for hibernation, some honey bees and a small cloud of busy hoverflies – which included the eponymous ‘ivy hoverflies’ and, judging from their vivid orange and black banding, also a few of the delightfully named ‘marmalade hoverflies’. Ivy provisions a multitude of bird species through the winter, too – blackbirds, dunnocks and thrushes, which rely on its nutritious black berries when other food sources have been exhausted.  It provides cover for tiny spiders, for the overwintering eggs and pupae of many moths and butterflies, and a safe retreat for small mammals and for nesting robins and wrens.  So, it’s at once a larder, a fortress and a home to a host of wildlife. 

No wonder, then, that ivy has entered human culture, too, as a symbol of evergreen life.  The ancient Greeks and Romans crowned the winners of poetry and athletic conquests with wreaths of ivy.  They also regarded it as an antidote to drunkenness, perhaps because their grape-vines would often become smothered by ivy.  Bacchus, the Roman god of intoxication, was usually depicted wearing a wreath of ivy and that connection continued in the medieval custom of having an ivy-topped pole outside ale houses.  Ivy featured in traditional health cures and it also became a symbol of the elite Ivy League of US universities, which planted ivy to commemorate each new term.  And finally, ivy and holly are a central part of our Christmas rituals, with the entwined ivy representing the female principle that binds everything together.

Jeremy Mynott
3 October 2024

‘Greenery’ – what a lovely word that is.  One of the great delights of an English spring is to see the hedges greening up day by day, from the first fresh buds in March through to the gorgeous extravagance of leaves and blossom in May.  The hedgerows are transformed in this annual miracle from the bare skeletons of winter to a burgeoning renewal in what the countryman-poet John Clare happily called, ‘the green life of change’.

We have something like 250,000 miles of hedgerows in Britain – about the distance to the moon – and they are one of our most important wildlife habitats.  These ‘edgelands’ were originally established to mark boundaries and contain stock, so they consisted predominantly of the thornier trees and bushes – especially hawthorn and blackthorn.  But over time ancient hedges will be joined by a rich variety of other natives like field maple, dog rose, crab apple, dogwood, hazel, spindle and buckthorn, and the hedge sides will meanwhile become cladded with a thick covering of ivy, brambles, honeysuckle and trailing plants.  As the great American writer and naturalist Thoreau remarked, ‘It is only necessary that man should start a fence and Nature will carry it on and complete it.’  

Such a hedge is a haven for wildlife – a larder, a highway, a fortress and a nursery.  Hedges support up to 80% of our woodland birds and half of our mammals.  Some 1,000 plant species and over 1,500 insect and invertebrate species have been recorded in our hedgerows.  Butterflies and moths depend on them for food and shelter; wild flowers flourish along their edges; countryside birds like linnets, yellowhammers and whitethroats use them as song posts and nesting sites; shy creatures like dormice find safe homes deep inside them; bats use them as navigational aids; and glow worms may illuminate them.  Lots of species even take their names from them: hedgehogs, hedge sparrows, hedge garlic, hedge parsley, hedge rustics (moths), woodland hedgehogs (mushrooms) …  We benefit too, of course. Hedges provide windbreaks, barriers to soil erosion and flood-defences. They also sequester huge amounts of carbon.  If you want to help counter climate-change you will get much better and quicker results from planting a new hedge than a tree. Then there is all the ‘food for free’ in the salads, berries, fruits and nuts that human foragers have gathered over the centuries and still do.  

This great natural resource has sadly been much reduced and damaged over recent decades, however, as many hedges have been replaced by barbed wire fences, while those that remain are regularly flailed to pieces.   Cheaper in the short-term maybe, but not everything that really counts is so easily countable.

Jeremy Mynott
5 May 2024