Here's my latest column for the newspaper:
You can tell it’s mulberry season in Appalachia without ever seeing a single mulberry – at least not a whole one, that is.
Just look down. Purple-stained sidewalks. Purple-spattered driveways. Purple bird droppings on parked cars. Mulberries arrive like a seasonal inconvenience, rather than a treasured fruit.
But, they are ubiquitous. They grow along fence rows, beside old homesteads, near railroad tracks, in vacant lots and at the edges of fields slowly being reclaimed by kudzu.
Unlike blackberries and raspberries, which grow on thorny canes, mulberries grow on trees. The berries look a bit like stretched-out blackberries, ripening from green to red before turning a deep shade of purple.
Red mulberries are native to Appalachia and much of eastern North America, while white mulberries arrived through failed attempts to establish a silk industry in the United States during the 18th and 19th centuries.
Silkworms feed on mulberry leaves, and early agricultural ventures looked to create domestic silk production. The silk industry never materialized in Appalachia, but the mulberry trees remain — outlasting the plans that brought them here.
That resilience made mulberries a natural fit for Appalachian food: pies, cobblers, jams, syrups, wines and preserves. The flavor of a mulberry lies somewhere between a blackberry and grape, and the texture is softer than most other wild berries.
That softness makes them difficult to transport and nearly impossible to stack neatly into grocery store displays. They bruise easily, spoil quickly and rarely survive more than a few days after harvest.
Mulberries never became a major commercial crop in the region, so you’ll usually only see them in juice or jam form in supermarkets.
Because they don’t travel well, mulberries stay very local — like backyard tree, church parking lot, baseball field local.
And perhaps that’s the mulberry’s greatest strength after all. They are too fleeting, too fragile and too messy to become polished. They don’t stay put long enough to be standardized, improved or packaged into something else.
They remain stubbornly local, leaving their mark on birds, sidewalks and summer itself before disappearing again a few weeks later.
