By Peter Coles

When biographer and historian, Claire Weiss, silk roads scholar, Susan Whitfield and I arrived at Eynsford station in Kent in early October on the train from Blackfriars, Tom Hart Dyke was already there, waiting to take us to his family home, Lullingstone Castle. Once celebrated for hosting the UK’s only commercial silk farm – created by Tom’s paternal grandmother, Zoë Lady Hart Dyke in 1934 – Lullingstone is now known for Tom’s own creation, the astonishing World Garden. 

From left to right, Susan Whitfield, Claire Weiss, Tom Hart Dyke and Sarah Hart Dyke
in the archive room of Lullingstone Castle

Claire already knew the Hart Dyke family and Lullingstone, having written about Zoe and her Essex origins in her book Unravelling the Yarn. And Susan knows the surrounding countryside well;  but this was my first visit. To my shame, though, given the scale of the World Garden  and Tom’s infectious enthusiasm for it, I was in search of something more humble (and probably no longer there) – any surviving mulberry trees from the era of the Lullingstone Silk Farm. At its height, over 20,000 mulberry trees had once stood on 21 acres of the castle estate, maintained as low bushes a few feet apart to make leaf harvesting easier.

The Silk Farm famously produced silk for the coronation robes of the late Queen Mother in 1937, the train of the late Queen Elizabeth II’s wedding dress (1947), and her coronation robes (1953).

Mulberry plantation

According to a little pamphlet written by Lady Zoë in 1945, and a fuller account in her 1949 autobiography, So Spins the Silkworm, the original mulberry plantation  had started out in 1934 with 5,000 white mulberry (Morus alba) ‘bushes’ (presumably saplings) imported from Italy, planted “in a paddock not far from the house.”  The following year she took delivery of 2,000 “standard mulberry trees” from Palestine (as there were supply problems with Italy), along with “a kilo of the best white mulberry seed” from the Var district of France. 

This produced 4,000 seedlings, grown on in a Kent nursery and planted out, alongside “about 16,000 of our own outdoor seedlings, raised from the same stock”, and “several hundred English mulberry trees purchased from various English nursery gardeners for experimental purposes.”  Meanwhile, a consignment of 15,000 mulberry bushes eventually arrived from Milan. By the end of 1937, she writes, “I had about 21 acres of land under mulberry cultivation.”

One of Zoë’s moriculture (mulberry cultivation) innovations was to ”bud a prolific Italian bush on to a sturdy French seedling,” adding that “we grew about 37,000 seedlings in this way and they quickly acclimatized to the surroundings”.

After the Silk Farm moved to Ayot St Lawrence in Hertfordshire in 1956, the Lullingstone mulberries were eventually grubbed out. John Feltwell, in his book The Story of Silk (1997) reports finding none when he visited in the 1990s. And, today, while there are dozens of beautiful trees of many species on the estate, including veteran Cedars of Lebanon and Tom’s National Eucalyptus Collection, there are just three mulberries.

Tom Hart Dyke by a White Mulberry 
where part of a mulberry plantation once stood

One, peeping over a wall of the World Garden is a White Mulberry (Morus alba), which could be a relic of Lady Zoë’s Silk Farm days, and now belongs to a part of the estate sold to a neighbour. The other, on the lawn in front of the World Garden, is an Osigian mulberry (Morus alba ‘Osigian’), an unusual cultivar I’d never come across before. A third – a Black Mulberry – is in the World Garden.

Black Mulberry in the World Garden

The Osigian Mulberry

Zoë experimented with many species and cultivars of mulberry during a lifetime of raising silkworms – and had even found that lettuce and endive would keep the creatures happy for a few weeks in an emergency. Having realised that it was better to coppice the trees so that they remained bushes, she came across a cultivar developed especially for feeding silkworms.

Curious to learn more, as was I, Claire Weiss looked up the story behind this cultivar in Lady Zoë’s book. The Osigian hybrid mulberry was apparently developed by a Dr Vartan K. Osigian of Venezuela in the early years of the 20th century. One of its virtues is to produce huge leaves, 18"- 22" long and to respond well to coppicing.

Huge leaves of the Osigian mulberry are fleshy, rather like those of the Catalpa

In 1944 the British Caribbean Silk Company Ltd apparently imported several thousand cuttings – which, says Zoë, is the only way to propagate the variety (it does not produce fruit and any seed would be sterile in any case). Within six months of planting the cuttings, Zoë tells us, 12" leaves were growing on trees 5' - 6' tall. “We are experimenting with this variety at the silk farm and up to date are finding it excellent,’ she writes (p.143).

Tom and Susan admiring the Osigian mulberry
which will die back and regrow next season

Today, Tom Hart Dyke’s solitary Osigian mulberry, protected from browsing deer by a wire cage, stands as a memorial to his paternal grandmother’s heritage rather than providing fodder for Bombyx mori silkworms – of which there are none.

Picking mulberry leaves in the 1940s at Lullingstone - is this an Osigian mulberry?

The World Garden

Although we came to Lullingstone in search of mulberry trees, at Tom’s kind invitation, it was his World Garden that stole the show.  With around 8,000 species of plant, Tom created the World Garden from scratch on the site of the walled herb garden created by his much-loved maternal grandmother 'Crac'. With her blessing, and his characteristically unorthodox style, Tom cleared the site with the aid of a couple of pigs, 'Woolly' and 'Red Spider' (named after pests of the orchid), rather than bulldozers.  The unique World Garden is laid out as miniature continents and islands, each with its own biome, separated by ‘ocean’ paths.

The garden, opened in 2005, is the realisation of a vision sketched out while Tom (an inveterate plant hunter) and fellow backpacker Paul Winder, were held captive at gunpoint by guerillas for nine months in the jungle of the notorious Darién Gap in Panama. Their account of this ordeal, The Cloud Garden, published in 2003, quickly became a bestseller and is both a fascinating and a humbling read. Tom tells the story of the making of the World Garden in another, entertaining book, An Englishman’s Home (2011).