I first came across mulberries, sticky-sweet and with a truly knockout aroma, when I was a student at Kew Gardens. I would hunt out the trees each summer and scoff their deep-purple fruit until my hands were stained bright burgundy.

Yet despite being one of the oldest of British fruits, the delicious mulberry has largely disappeared from UK diets – and sadly with pretty good reason. The fruit are so soft they bruise at the slightest touch, making getting them from the garden to kitchen in perfect shape tricky, let alone surviving the rigours of industrial, long-haul transport. Even if you grow your own, the trees reputedly take up to eight or nine years to get up to full production, longer than pretty much any other fruit crop, and even then are only in season for a few weeks a year.

Wouldn’t it be great if some ingenious plant breeder created a new variety that could slash the time needed before harvest, extend the cropping season and even improve total yield? Well, according to a Devon trial that I participated in last year, it seems they have.

Mulberry ‘Charlotte Russe’ is a new, super-fast-growing hybrid form that astonishingly is capable of fruiting in the same year, creating not a towering tree but a neat 1.5m suckering bush. Its comparatively small size means it is a far more practical option in our ever-shrinking plots and will even grow well in a pot on a patio or large balcony.

Despite being described as a variety of Morus nigra, the traditional black mulberry, its appearance strongly suggests it is an interspecies hybrid that crosses two or more mulberry species. This would explain its ridiculous growth rate and early fruiting, combined with its astonishingly long season. In the Devon trial this fruited from late May right up until September, making it one of the longest seasons of any fruit crop I can think of.

This is because interspecies crosses often exhibit a phenomenon known as “hybrid vigour”, where the offspring of two different species tend to be significantly more prolific, fast-growing and resilient than either of their parents. As a consequence of their diverse parentage, these hybrids often tend also to be sterile, which gives this crop another benefit: the berries lack seeds, making them (for many people) far better eating.

Plants are fully hardy and self-fertile and will produce the best crops in a sunny spot in rich well-drained soil. So far this brand new variety has only been tested in the UK for one season, but the results have been pretty exceptional, and if you’d like to try it out for yourself, limited quantities are currently stocked by Suttons Seeds. In my opinion this is a new crop that deserves many more trials across the country.

Email James at james.wong@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @Botanygeek