Purple reign

sorry @Carld, i cannot ship budwood to countries with stringent quarantine regs…
was wondering(and almost certain), could those varieties come in other monikers in the old world? You know how we yanks tend to embellish fruit names with fancy schmancy … Some american nurseries even go a step further by registering trademarks on the cultivars they import–‘winter delight’, ‘autumn beauty’, etc.
rubra is the only edible(and mediocre)native mulb species in usa, and better cultivars were undoubtedly imported from eurasia, and simply just baptized with saintly ‘gerardi’ and mystical ‘saharanpur’, obviously for marketing purposes.
about gerardi, and not sure if this helps, this trivial offer, but have a fair visual concept of how gerardi’s look like(basic growth habit, earliness, and fruit shape). You might want to post at european fruit threads(am sure you have many, maybe even more than here) and ask if anyone happens to have a mulberry that is even slower-growing than nigras. If you could obtain pictures of trees and berries, and some tree/fruit feedback from the owners, you could post it here and will gladly give insight as to the chances of it being the gerardi. Am sure there are others here who also have gerardi’s and could chime in.

i find saharanpur and virtually all other varieties to have ambiguous characteristics, but apart from contorted albas— the nigras and gerardi’s are fairly easy to isolate.

Lol juju! Well in Europe we mainly only find a few cultivars/varieties usually: 1. Black mulberry (alba/hybrid) 2. White mulberry (white fruits alba) 3. Red mulberry (morus rubra) 4. Morus nigra 5. Giant fruit mulberry (pakistan mulberry/macroura/alba pakistan or whatever the actual classification is… Lol) 6. Wellington mulberry (alba/hybrid), 7. weeping (pendula fruiting variety). I have them all. We dont have for sale all those hybrids/cultivars we see on American nurseries like oscar/silk hope/shangri la/middleton/wacissa/etc etc etc … Lol! Oscar and shangri la i was able to root already :). Now i’m trying to find a source for the saharanpur, red himalayan and long fruit taiwan varieties. Will try again (for the 5th time to root or graft silk hope and saharanpur). I have a mulberry tree that i bought last year from a nursery with the tag morus kagayamae bombcys (fruiting variety), it grew like mad and it never fruited, produces lots of male fruits only :frowning:

seems that the EU has more strict quarantine regulations than we do. I mean, eurasia was, and presumably still is, the hotbed/melting pot of most desirable mulberries. Proximity alone, plus, the continuum of land borders should have facilitated trading, or perhaps ‘trafficking’ of such cultivars(if they are truly desirable). No atlantic or pacific ocean to traverse, yet unavailable. I too am sore that saharanpur budwood could only reach portugal by way of usa, having traversed the pond twice!

only plausible reason could think of is that the relative availability of nigra trees in many parts of europe(and your old tree is a superb example!) dampen any intent of would-be importers to trudge quarantine for ‘lesser’ cultivars.
as a sidenote, it is also strange that people from mainland china come to vegas(in droves), to purchase iphones and tablets(all made in china), because it is cheaper to buy them here than purchase it there. So those gadgets literally traversed the vast pacific— twice.

I must confess that no other of my mulberries comes close to the nigra taste, so its a possible explanation for it indeed, another explanation could be that most of those cultivars are hybrids with morus rubra, an endemic species from America, in Europe we have nigras and albas, not rubras… So with such hybridization more cultivars appear.

that’s another possibility. Many locals don’t speak highly of rubras compared to the better white mulb cultivars, but that does not mean rubras cannot produce a hybrid with-better tasting berries than any of its parents.

Hello Carld, i´m from Germany and interested in mulberries too. In searching for Gerardi Dwarf did you find this shop from Poland?

http://cornusmas.eu/

I ordererd a Gerardi Dwarf and a Shin-Tso cultivar. If everything works out they ship in autumn. If you have the patience, we can swap scions later on. But it might be a year later since i dont know the size of the trees. They are shipped in 2l containers.

With the kind help of another grower here in Germany i got my hands on a morus nigra “Jerusalem”. And i grafted 2 different cultivars of morus nigra, which i brought back from Gran Canaria in may. The motherplants are 2 very old and quite big trees. I suspect those are seedling trees, but both had a lot of immature fruit. Hoping to get a first taste next year.

To save your old tree try grafting low onto cuttings of morus alba and root those (or root the alba first, both ways are possible). To get this tree true to the roots you can then later on plant the tree deep. With some luck the scion will develop own roots. That happens quite often by accident, when people are planting their trees too deep. In those cases its an unwanted process but you can use it to your advantage.

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Hello everyone. First time posting. I live in South Florida zone 10B. I grew up in Lebanon feasting in the summer season on black mulberries (Morus nigra). They are called locally Damascus mulberries (or Tout Shami in Arabic).
They stain wickedly, but taste heavenly!!! I have been wanting to grow a tree in Miami. One kind of mulberry grows very well down here. It is called Tropical Everbearing black mulberry. Very easy to propagate via cuttings. Small fruit with good taste, but no comparison to the real “Morus nigra”. By the way, I think like most of you that most if not all M. nigra cultivars are one and the same, with slight regional variations due to soil/climate vagaries (the French call it “Terroir”). At any rate, I am embarking on a project to try to graft an authentic M. nigra on one of these knock off black mulberries. What is the best method to go about doing this? What type of grafting, when, etc. Also anyone has any experience successfully air-layering an M. nigra?
Thanks

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i tried it a couple of times, to no avail. And even if i did get lucky, am sure the outcome wouldn’t be as promising as when grafted to seedling rootstock with vigorous taproot systems.
nigras grow really slow here, am afraid growing them on ‘fibrous’ roots will add many years to the already long wait.
quite sure you miss your Damascus mulberries! I would too if had to move from here.

@Derby42 , @tonyOmahaz5, @clarkinks and many other enthusiasts posted a commendable array of grafted mulberries(and among the family). You could refer to Che, mulberry, osage orange, fig grafting - #93 by tonyOmahaz5

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the close-up pic showing foliage, stem, and fruits depicts a true nigra. A 300 yr old one at that, and still productive.
and having lived for centuries in england, it may be the cultivar capable of tolerating and bearing fruits in the humid american southeast

suddenly craving for info about nigras and what old trees look like in uk, and intrigued that it is reported to grow in scotland as well.

http://www.moruslondinium.org/research/faq

and here’s one more for @Livinginawe

http://www.moruslondinium.org/map/identify

Nice website (moruslondinium.org)…I hadn’t run across it before…Thanks! Bold statement (cause it’s hard to prove): “Unlike the white mulberry, there is really only one variety and few cultivars of black mulberry.”
I’ve never read an explanation for nigras extremely gnarled trunk…Anybody know?

[quote=“Livinginawe, post:47, topic:5707”]
only one variety and few cultivars of black mulberry.
[/quote] that was confusing me too. Perhaps they meant to say there are few cutivars of just one species. We’re dealing with british english there, eh, @Carld ? :wink:

age and inclement weather are probaby major explanations. Those trees definitely experienced more than their fair share of windy weather, twistings, shearings and such, having lived for centuries. Maybe also gall, or something similar. Intriguing though that @Carld 's centenarian nigra seems not as gnarled as those oldies in uk. Definitely plays into the arguments about nigras coming in different cultivars.

many in the fig family do get gnarly naturally as they get older. Have seen really old stands of vegas fig trees looking like banyans in typhoon belts.

Well i believe very old nigras in Portugal are quite gnarled also. Mine isnt because as i said in a previous post 90% of the tree collapsed in a storm over 30y ago or so and so what was left of it i believe was a branch. The people we had to take care of our farm are now long gone, so I cant say for sure, but i would bet the tenant at the time just stuck one of the remaining branches deep in the soil with a tractor, but cant say for sure

morus nigra in the south of Portugal, Algarve

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morus nigra in the north of Portugal, Tras os Montes

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morus nigra in the centre if a very small little village in north of portugal

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My morus nigra :).






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i now see the tortuous joints. I guess it is universal regardless of location and climate

btw, beautiful pictures, and really nice sceneries with the semi-ruins and stonework.

when they say ‘old world’, timeless nigra trees sure come to mind.

Its beautiful to see the scenery, old stonework, visigoth and roman ruins and these old trees next to it, there are some pretty old chestnut and olive trees around also, their age no one knows, some say 2000 y old but who knows. Lol! Regarding nigras i really doubt at all there are any difference or cultivars between them. I think they get different names depending the region or farm or area they came from… Chelsea or king james, jerusalem, AGM, etc… all the same in my opinion…

http://www.theportugalnews.com/news/portugals-oldest-tree-rooted-in-the-algarve/1867

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