Open to the public Sundays 1-4pm. (1) The Queen's Orchard was part of Greenwich Park from the 17th century onwards, but was alienated in 1976 when the Greenwich Hospital Estate sold it to Greenwich Council. It remained in their ownership and was managed as a wildlife garden until it was returned to The Royal Parks. It reopened in April 2013 after restoration. Heritage fruit trees were planted in 2011, some dating back to 1500s. (2) There is a fine black mulberry, possibly a James I planting emerging from a mound about half way into the orchard.. According to an RGS volunteer, the tree was hit by the storm of 1987, but was replanted. The mound it was on had been covered with wild flowers. These were removed and new flowers sown. The mound had also been banked up. There are records of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) commissioning “…a faire standing seat in the mulberry tree garden and a new seat with four pillars under the same tree for her majestie” in 1598-9, when she was 65 years old. Is this that same tree? An archaeological survey has dated it to the 19th century, but In 1821, the natural historian Henry Philips was visiting Reverend Dr Alexander Crombie in his house “adjoining Greenwich Park” – today’s Greenwich Park Street near the Orchard. He describes seeing a “dilapidated” ancient mulberry tree which “…throws out ten large branches so near the earth, that it has the appearance of half a score of large trees rather than of one; and notwithstanding many of the projecting branches have been sawed off, still it completely covers a circumference of 150 feet.” The tree Philips describes in 1821 could easily be at least 200 years old, so it may have been Elizabeth’s mulberry that he saw.

Public transport: Maze Hill overground

Find out more at www.royalparks.org.uk/parks/greenwich-park/things-to-see-and-do/gardens-and-landscapes/the-q

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