It’s late summer and most of the fruit on the black mulberry tree in Inner Temple gardens in central London has fallen, staining the path crimson. I pick one of the few that remains, withering slowly on the branch, and a flow of magenta juice runs down my arm. “Caught red-handed,” says Greg Packman, the arboriculturalist who is showing me around. The phrase dates from the 16th century, he says, when mulberry trees were planted around St James’s Park by James I, who believed that silkworms fed on their fruit. He was wrong — it is the white mulberry tree that silkworms breed in — but the value and taste of the soot-black berries made them prime targets for thieves, who could be spotted by

Source: The Times September 12, 2020 17:02 UTC