Pruning the mulberry tree
I have a collection of these photos. Eight of them for every year of living on this farm.
The very first winter I was too nervous to prune this strange creature and had to get help.
I’ve never had such a tree. They are called mulberry plane tree hybrids – murier-platane. And are very popular. The plane tree is the trunk and the mulberry is grafted on top to create the shade with its branches.
You have to pollard it back to its main trunks every year.
If you have travelled through France you will know that this treatment is handed out to plane trees, mulberries, and all sorts of trees that are grown for their shade giving properties in summer. You don’t want them to grow to their natural width. 
If we didn’t prune this beast back, it would probably have spread to both houses in the courtyard by now.
So it gets a radical haircut each year.
I studied how it was done the very first time and then bravely placed the ladder up against its thick trunk and set to.
Thank goodness I’m not scared of heights. You have to climb right into the canopy to reach the highest pesky branches.
When I start I try to direct all the pruned branches into the wheelbarrow. But once your arms get tired from wielding the heavy loppers, you just let the branches fall.
It’s a two cup of tea problem. I find I can only collect the fallen branches once the tree is completely bald.
They will go straight down to be chipped.
It’s great exercise. And I haven’t fallen out of the tree yet.
2nd December 2015 @ 7:34 pm
Hi there! I’m in the north west of England and a friend in France has just posted this link as I’ve never seen a Mulberry bush before. Do you know if they’d grow in our climate? What conditions do they like to grow well? Many thanks!
Arlene Harris
2nd December 2015 @ 8:20 pm
Hi Arlene, lovely to hear from you. The word bush for mulberry is really a misnomer. It’s just a tree. But I think they can easily become massive in girth and present a wayward bushy shape as they tend to lose large branches which fall slowly to the ground and then root. They layer well, so I guess that might be the reason for the name bush. Mulberries come from drier and more mountainous areas than the NW of England. Ours are the white mulberry variety which was used for silkworm production (our farm was a silkworm farm in the 17th and 18th centuries). It has discrete white fruit which look dessicated but are actually delicious. But the black mulberry produces much juicier fruit. I think you should give it a go. But make sure you give it room. Here’s the link to the RHS website which will give you ideas. https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?pid=642
29th July 2024 @ 7:41 am
Interesting post! I was visiting friends in southern France who have a mulberry-plane hybrid. The trunk is clearly mulberry not plane.
30th July 2024 @ 12:42 pm
Hi Andy, I guess I should have done the latin names to avoid confusion. It’s often the case that I can get tripped up. If you do an image search on morus Australis, or morus Kagayamae you will see my tree.