White Mulberry

Morus alba, the white mulberry, common mulberry or silkworm mulberry, is a fast-growing, small to medium-sized tree 10 to 20 metres tall, native to China and widely cultivated and naturalised elsewhere. It has been grown widely, from the Indian subcontinent west to southern Europe, for more than a thousand years for leaves to feed silkworms, and sericulture was one of the main reasons the tree spread. The leaves also feed livestock, and mulberry leaf tea is drunk. The flowers are single-sex catkins, and the fruit, deep purple in the wild but white to pink in many cultivated plants, is sweet but often insipid. The tree is notable for the fastest known movement in the plant kingdom: its catkins launch pollen at about half the speed of sound. In traditional Chinese medicine the bark, leaves and fruit are used to treat fever and raised blood pressure, among other things. The leaf is also sold as a dietary supplement for weight loss and diabetes.