The mulberry bushes near my place are city creatures – understated and confined, weeping gracefully onto the little patch of pavement that hems them in, the concrete apron around the square half-metre in which they have been allowed to take root. They are lovely nonetheless; their green still fresh after the month of January in which Melbourne is like a ghost town, before the daily traffic ramps up to coat them with dust and exhaust fumes so that they no longer look elegantly weeping, more just plain exhausted.
The mulberry I recall was very different, a grandmother of a tree – a family could camp under its sheltering branches.
It belonged to friends of ours who lived at Bridgewater Lakes, outside the western district town of Portland, where we lived and worked and from where we needed to escape sometimes with our tribe of kids.
They lived in a house built by her grandfather, surrounded by a cottage garden that seemed to grow effortlessly, and, a little distance from the old house, a massive mulberry tree.
We swam in those lakes, we had picnics and boat trips and camped the night and had dozens of cups of tea in their kitchen. In late summer we had a special excursion to their place to pick the mulberries.
We went clad in our oldest clothes, armed with empty ice-cream containers and a stepladder. The kids didn't stay in their clothes for long, the little ones stripping off to nothing. We parents ate a few and stashed most of our crop prudently away in our containers; the kids gorged themselves utterly, covering themselves with livid purple juice. Juice all around their little mouths, up their dimpled arms, all over their chunky thighs and rotund bellies. We have a photo of our third, aged about two, perched on the top of the stepladder, covered in mulberry splotches, cramming a mulberry-full fist up to a baby mouth that is grinning from ear to ear, nose wrinkled in ecstasy.
We ate those fabulous berries fresh, we had them with cream, with ice-cream, we made pies and tarts. Best of all, we froze some so that way into autumn and winter we could thaw them out, fill a pastry case, pop them in the oven, take a bite and be wafted back to high summer, kind friends, a ravishingly beautiful place and children who were safe enough to cavort in the shade of the generous old tree, clothed in nothing but mulberry juice.
Clare Boyd-Macrae is a regular contributor.
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