MULBERRY FAMILY 
styles two, thread-like ; ovary two-celled, one cell small and finally 
disappearing. 
Fruit.—Compound, consisting of drupes each inclosed in a 
thickened, fleshy calyx. Bright red at first, finally dark purple, 
sweet and juicy; about an inch long. July. 
The tree (the Mulberry) is found in abundance in the northwestern parts 
of Florida. The Choctaws put its inner bark in hot water along with a quantity 
of ashes and obtain filaments, with which they weave a kind of cloth not unlike 
a coarse hempen cloth. ; ' 
—Romans'’s ‘Natural History of Florida.” 
There are three well known mulberries, the Red, the 
Black, and the White ; so named because of the color of their 
fruit. The Red Mulberry is the American species and bears 
the characteristic berry of the genus which is 
an aggregate fruit of many drupes. It resem- 
bles a blackberry. In ripening it is first red, 
then dark purple. In taste it is rather insipid, 
but is loved by the birds. 
The «Red Mulberry is generally distributed, 
but rarely attains great size. Standing in the 
southern forests it reaches the height of seventy 
feet, but ordinarily it is a low broad branched 
tree with trunk proportionately thickened. Like 
the Sassafras it bears leaves varying in form, 
some heart-shaped and others lobed. But these 
Mulberry, leaves are too thick and rough even when young 
Morus rue to make proper food for the silkworm, which 
bra, about 
1 long. 
Fruit of Red 
in a cold climate, feeds with advantage on the 
leaves of the White Mulberry only. 
Professor Sargent says of it, “Surpassing as it does in 
height and breadth all mulberry trees of temperate regions, 
the dense shade afforded by its broad compact crown of 
dark blue green leaves, its freedom from disease and the 
attacks of disfiguring insects, its prolificness, its hardiness 
except in its carliest years, and the rapidity of its growth in 
good soil, make it a most desirable ornamental tree.” 
The Black Mulberry, d/orus nigra, is the tree common in 
Europe, introduced it 1s supposed from Persia, that native 
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