I hope my mulberry tree (which is a scion of the Tewksbury Mulberry that has a good possibly apocryphal story that I'll add in thread) lives as long as this one. SAVE THE BETHNAL GREEN MULBERRY - Sign the Petition! http://chng.it/ww7zrW6f  via @UKChange

So mulberries, with their glorious smokey-sweet fruit, aren't native to the UK. They are an eastern tree and got to the west - apparently - due to an early instance of industrial espionage that desperately needs to be a novel. 1/ um several probably.

The macguffin in this case was silk. It had been traded since before the Romans and people in the West, as we unfortunately have tended to think, felt it was unfair that far off people had silk and we didn't. So various attempts were made to find out where it came from. 2/?

China obviously. But how was it made? Travellers tales cant always be trusted , especially when they insist silk comes from worms. OUR worms dont do silk even if you threaten them with excommunication! So people were sent to establish trade deals (ie snoop) 3/?

In those days the organisation with the clout connections and wealth to set up long distance travel was the Church. Also those silk vestments were very desirable. So they sent a delegation of along the Silk route to see what they could find out. 4/?

The production of silk was quite a secret so it took some shenanigans to discover that the worms were actually caterpillars that spun the silk into protective cocoons for while they changed into moths. 5/?

And isnt that an amazing thing? Nature is wonderful. It's also amazing that someone was fiddling with a cocoon one day, found the end of the thread and thought "if I wound a whole load of these together I could make some string" People are amazing too. 6/?

Anyway, amazing or not, there was a lot of money to be made from silk so those traders paid some bribes and sent men home with samples of raw silk, an account of how it is made and a quantity of cuttings - no point in stealing the worms until there's food fir them! 7/?

The cuttings took and grew into elegant little trees with good shade, broad leaves, brittle branches and astonishing black fruits that look like blackberries but taste I like to imagine the Pope wiping juice from his chin and saying "now bring me worms!" 8/?

Which is where it all went horribly wrong! 9/?

The caterpillars were obtained, probably by nefarious means though, I dunno, maybe the contacts passed them over happily, sent the adventurous monks on their way then fel about laughing because - omg! 10/?

Those mulberry cuttings? The ones carefully transported over deserts and mountains and sea? They were the wrong sort of mulberry! As in not the sort of mulberry you feed to silk worms! All that trouble all those miles all those sins on their consciences and dead worms! 11/?