Just a postscript, really, to the previous post. Since writing that, I’ve found a couple more pieces of information about mulberries at Sayes Court.
Firstly, there were mulberries, probably black ones, in the garden even before Evelyn took it over. Letters from Christopher Brown to his son Richard Brown (Evelyn’s future father-in -law) describe their garden at Sayes Court in March and June 1642. The easterly winds that year damaged the damask roses, as well as the walnut trees and – the mulberries.
Secondly, there is a letter to Evelyn dated 11 April 1670, signed N. Jameson, apparently the minister of St Paul’s church in Hackney, asking if he knows how or by whom the seeds of the white mulberry can be obtained: “by all the enquiry I could hitherto make by my friends about London for some seed of the whiter kind, which your book treats of, I have not hitherto been so happy as to procure any, nor indeed to meet with those who ever heard of any such mulberry or seed.”
Finally, here is proof that Evelyn did indeed have one or more white mulberries at Sayes Court, brought to him from Languedoc. This passage is from Dendrologia, printed as part of the fourth edition of Sylva. He praises the mulberry for its useful wood, implies its fruit and leaves are undervalued, and then continues:
“But it is not here I would recommend our ordinary black fruit bearers, though that be likewise worth the propagation; but that kind which is call’d the white mulberry (which I have had sent me out of Languedoc) one of them of a broad leaf, found there and in Provence, whose seeds being procured from Paris, where they have it from Avignon, should be thus treated in the seminary.” He goes on to talk at length about how to grow the white mulberry, including the suggestion of improving it by grafting it onto black mulberry.
References:
Darley, G. 2006, John Evelyn, Living for Ingenuity, p. 79 and p. 319, n. 11
Bray, W., 1887, Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, vol. III, p. 227.
Dendrologia, p. 204, at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20778/20778-h/20778-h.htm#II_CHAPTER_I
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