Category: Flora

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

‘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 

Immigration is an emotive subject.  In the natural world, that is, never mind the human one.  People are rightly very keen to protect what remains of our natural heritage of native plants and animals – we’ve lost so much in the last 75 years or so, most of it through our own doing.  But that has also made us suspicious of foreign competition, particularly when it seems to threaten some favourite native species. It’s true that historically there have been some disastrous introductions of invasive species: whether accidental, in the case of the beetles in imported timber that gave us the Dutch elm disease which changed our landscapes for ever; or deliberate, in the case of North American grey squirrels that were released at Woburn Abbey in the nineteenth century and have since been displacing our native red squirrels (and hence get blamed, like the American wartime GIs, for being oversized, oversexed and over here).  

It gets historically and emotionally complicated, however, when we start to challenge the origins of anything we regard as a pest or a public nuisance.  Take the case of Alexanders, the wild parsley with the glossy green leaves and yellowish heads we see flourishing now on roadside verges in coastal districts.  I’ve heard the most xenophobic descriptions of it as a ‘foreign’ or even, on an ascending scale of hostility, an ‘alien’ plant, to be eradicated before it overwhelms all our hard-pressed natives.  And there are regular patriotic campaigns to decapitate all these unwelcome invaders.  

Hang on, though. The Alexanders came here with the Romans some two thousand years ago, valued as an all-purpose spring vegetable.  The leaves were used in salads, the roots roasted like parsnips and the black seeds ground as spice.  The monks used to cultivate Alexanders in their herb gardens in the medieval period.  And the name itself has nothing to do with Alexander the Great’s all-conquering invasions but is an English corruption of the Latin name Olus Ater (‘Black Herb’).  If you’re going to say Alexanders are non-natives that don’t belong here, how about our much-loved Brown Hares that arrived about the same time?  How about our glorious Horse Chestnut trees, which came from Turkey in the sixteenth century; or the cute Little Owls, introduced only in the late nineteenth century?  What about buddleia for that matter– imported from China in the 1890s – which nature-lovers actively plant to support our native butterflies?  It’s hard to be consistent. 

In deep history, the most invasive species of all has of course been Homo sapiens, populating the whole globe and continuing to displace its wildlife everywhere.  Who is the real menace?

Jeremy Mynott
6 June 2023