Purple reign

7 foot persian mulb initially grafted low, which the nursery trimmed and repotted to a 15 gallon after many years of growth, apparently concealed behind other mulbs in the nursery.

one of its branches a few days earlier with berries tucked neath foliage

two year old gerardi(left), and 3 year old black beauty mulb, both not much more than 2 feet tall.

gerardi/geraldi, the other mulb we don’t prune

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I have to report,my Geraldi Mulberry fruit are the blandest thing I grow.Even an unripe red Wellington has more flavor.
The little neighbor boy who used to eat them,has left them alone.Now they hang on the tree or fall off and I’m not sure if the ants are going after those.
I’ll probably keep the plant,just to see if things get better. Brady

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where we’re at, there is some tart to geraldi berries, but certainly lack the firework flavor bursts typical of nigras. They are quite sweet to our taste, though, so it could also be a regional thing/dependent on growing conditions.

Hi! I am a huge mulberry fan, i have a few varieties already and always looking for more. I am located in both England and Portugal and i’ve been looking for the himalayan (red long fruit mulberry),the saharanpur (white long fruit mulberry) and the gerardi dwarf for years, havent found any nurseries in Europe selling them :frowning: . At the moment the varieities i have are: Oscar mulberry, shangri-la, wellington, pakistan and at least 3 diferent morus nigra (king james/chelsea, AGM, Charlton HOuse, a variety coming from Germany, another coming from Italy, and a very large Portuguese one on my family farm - this one is centenary. In terms of taste, for me nothing beats the morus nigra, and the Portuguese variety is by far the one that produces the biggest, juicest fruits. I’m happy to swap cuttings, air layers with the other ones if anyone interested.
Best one at the moment is the fruit of nigra in my portuguese variety, big, juicy, spicy! Gonna try to post pictures

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did you just say centenarian?? Wow! am sure many people here would like to see a picture of a 100 year old nigra tree!
wish i could vouch for the saharanpur and gerardi, but they are just too far behind what you are already growing! Totally understand though you’re probably just like many fanciers–having that desire to make the collection complete.

also wishing could trade with you but it is illegal to send budwood to private addresses in usa, and quite certain England and EU will have similar restrictions. Probably best you contact burntridgenursery.com or whitmanfarms.com. They usually sell both( or at least one of those) you’ve listed. Got to warn you though that mulberry identification is still quite dubious here in usa.

Hi juju, yes, its a problem to get plant material from the outside the EU, i can easily move plant material between the EU (Portugal, Spain, Uk, Germany, etc), but not from the outside, however i already got a few cuttings in the past from the US through Ebay, from karenkenks or something like that, got all her mulberry varieties (silk hope, shangri la, oscar, saharanpur, black beauty), tried rooting them and grafting them… Only shangri la and oscar cuttings manage to survive and root… Lol! Was planning to contact just fruit and exotics nursery but they are quite clear in their page they dont ship to outside the US. Morus identification is also very dubious in Europe… You can quite easy be buying a morus nigra from a nursery and get a morus alba… So people, are missing the “real deal”… Regarding morus nigra, yes I have several locations but i do believe they are all the “same animal”. I believe my portuguese cultivar is better than my other nigras because: 1. Its older, 2. Gets mediterranean weather (well defined seasons, very hot summers, cold winters), 3. Type of soil. The history of this nigra is integring, was there in the time of my great grandfather and it was already very old then. 20 years ago in a storm it completely collapsed, was removed and only 1 branch leftover was left in the ground wich is the current tree. I am trying to propagate it but its not easy… No sapplings in the area! Unsucessful in rooting cuttings! Unsucessful in grafting so far. I fear another storm kills it and the trunk is already angled down also.





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The surviving old lady

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i know it is just a picture, but got to hand it to you—i have NEVER seen anything like it. It is beautiful!

have seen one in some Greek webpage depicting an 800 year old tree, but it had a much smaller canopy, presumably damaged by lightning or windy weather when the pic was taken(the longer a tree lives, the chances of it getting hit by a ‘big one’ increases…)

if you compare the branches, even the main trunk, of my fruiting ~10 year old ‘spring chickens’ to those with smaller caliper branches of your tree, mine are too smooth, coddled and pampered i feel they need to be shipped to mulberry boot camp for several decades more.

you are not the first person to say that, and i too, am beginning to have my doubts about the fancy schmancy names as noir, black beauty, etc.

i have successfully grafted nigras to albas, but they take forever to grow decided to buy the biggest, hence oldest specimens could get my hands on. Have never been lucky with marcots though, but not that it should matter, considering the laggard growth

btw, fruits are rarely available even in farmers markets here, and on the few occasions that they are, nigra berries are sold for 20$/lb.
again, thanks for posting, and feel free to post more!

Thanks for the reply juju, my father still tells me stories that in his childhood the tree was soo massive that it could handle 10 adults on its branches. I dont remember the tree on its former glory, but i am adamant to preserve it as possible. No idea on its real age, no one in the village is either. It has always been there and no one knows of any other nearby. Do you have the red himalayan elongated variety? If so, hows its taste like?

probably much more than ‘just’ a century old if it had trunks bigger than what you posted!

btw, had several elongated varieties but not sure if had the red himalayan. I culled through several varieties over 4 years due to lack of space, and contingent to tree size-to-productivity ratios. I remember having the sarahanpur but it wasn’t worth the space it occupied considering its vigor(relative to quality of the fruit). I now just have two kinds of black beauty( a true nigra and an impostor alba/alba cross), noirs, persians, pakistani, and gerardis. Couldn’t remember much about the quality of those that have tried and removed, perhaps due to getting bedazzled by the nigras.

i actually almost removed the pak but granted a reprieve when it started fruiting thick and long ones, which tasted better than sarahanpur. The gerardis i still have not because it has stellar taste(which is just average), but because the specimens bear quite densely, considering the bushy ornamental growth.
it is supposedly from the himalayas too, and may be related to other elongated mulbs.

Gonna try to find the gerardi and elongated varieties in Europe again. Lol!

Stopped by a nursery an hour or so from the house and saw an unusual mulberry today.

I’m kicking myself as I should have, at least, taken a picture of it

It was called “paper dolls mulberry” and it has white-edge variegated leaves. They had 2 plants and each was under a foot tall.

Plants were small and I wanted to research it a little before getting one.

Anyone else seen one?

Scott

cool stuff!

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.