Royal Follies and Fruitful Mistakes: The Mulberry Legacy of Thomas Gainsborough
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
August 2, 1788
On this day, dear garden friends, we remember the inimitable master of landscapes and portraits, Thomas Gainsborough, who departed this mortal canvas on this very day in 1788.
While the rest of London mourned a painter, we gardeners lost a kindred spirit who understood the verdant poetry of a well-composed landscape.
His "Blue Boy" may command the attention of art historians and gallery-goers today, but I find his true legacy blooms rather magnificently in the garden of his Suffolk home. There stands a mulberry tree of such venerable age and dignified bearing that it remembers the whispers of courtiers during James I's reign in the early 1600s.
One can almost picture the royal decree unfurling across England: "Plant mulberries! We shall have silk!"
Poor James and his advisers, with ambitions as grand as their botanical knowledge was limited.
They failed to distinguish between the white mulberry—the silkworm's preferred delicacy—and the black mulberry, which offers succulent fruits but leaves silkworms thoroughly unimpressed.
And so it was that Gainsborough's mulberry—like every other tree enthusiastically planted across England during this misguided horticultural campaign—was of the black variety. The king's dreams of a silk empire unraveled while the trees themselves put down stubborn roots and thrived in delicious defiance.
Though England never did become the silk capital James envisioned, the art of silk weaving took hold with the tenacity of bindweed in August. The silk industry flourished even as the silkworms themselves refused to cooperate with royal planning.
Isn't that always the way with the best-laid gardening schemes?
Beyond the magnificent mulberry, Gainsborough's garden offers two meticulously maintained herb beds that would make any kitchen gardener swoon with envy. A third bed is devoted exclusively to dyeing plants—a botanical palette that would have colored the very fabrics Gainsborough later immortalized with his brush.
The remainder of the garden consists solely of plants that would have been available during the artist's lifetime—a living botanical time capsule. One imagines Gainsborough himself strolling these paths, perhaps pausing beneath the mulberry's generous shade to sketch a composition or contemplate a portrait.
This garden stands as testament to a truth we cultivators have always known: long after the canvas has faded and the paint has cracked, a well-planted tree continues telling its story, one season at a time.
Gainsborough's brush may rest, but his mulberry still bears fruit—both literal and metaphorical—for those wise enough to visit and listen to its rustling leaves.
