Foraging Mulberries (Morus sp.)

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Wild mulberries are prolific edible wild fruits, and they’re easy to find in both the urban and rural neighborhoods.

Wild Mulberry

Mulberries are a favorite with birds, and you can often spot a tree with your ears…just listening to the noisy birds fighting over the fruit. If the birds don’t give them away, take a look at the bottom of your shoes after a walk in the park and you may well find crushed mulberry fruit. What the birds don’t eat, they drop and it makes a mess all over the grass and sidewalk.

In the woods, squirrels and other wild creatures are quick to clean them up, but in the city, they can linger and stain the pavement, which is a dead giveaway.

While they were once valued as an important food source, both for their berries and leaves, they’re now mostly considered a nusance, and just something that dirties up your walk to the grocery store (where you’ll pay handily for fruit that’s less fresh than what you just passed).

If you do find a wild mulberry, there’s really nothing quite like it, and nothing else looks like blackberries growing on trees.

What are Mulberries?

Mulberries or Morus species are a genus of perennial, deciduous trees in the Moracea family, often called the Fig or Mulberry family. There are many species of Mulberry, and they’re native to different parts of the temperate world, including South America, North America, Asia, and parts of Africa.

Many species of Mulberry are under cultivation and have widely naturalized outside of their native range. For example, the Black Mulberry (Morus nigra) is native to southwestern Asia but has naturalized throughout Europe, including Ukraine, China, and much of the Middle East.

Two species of Mulberry are native to the United States, the Red Mulberry (Morus rubra) and the Texas Mulberry (Morus microphylla). However, the Asian or White Mulberry (Morus alba), native to China and India, has naturalized in North America and is now the most widespread species in the United States. It’s also very difficult to distinguish from the Red Mulberry.

Much of Mulberry’s spread is thanks to humans who cultivated them for food and other products. For example, the Havasupai people of the southwestern United States introduced the Texas Mulberry to the bottom of the Gran Canyon in pre-historic times. European settlers introduced the White Mulberry into the United States in the 1600s to promote a North American silk industry.

In 1624 the legislature of Virginia required every male resident to plant at least four white mulberry trees.

My daughter Holding Mulberry Fruit

Are Mulberries Edible?

Mulberry trees are best known for producing tasty edible berries. The berries contain many essential antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals, and researchers believe they have several health benefits. You can eat Mulberries raw or cook them much like you would blackberries.

Some foragers also use mulberry leaves, young tender twigs, and bark. In many Asian countries, traditional medicine practitioners often use the leaves in teas and tinctures. Occasionally, people will use young mulberry leaves raw or as a cooked green.

However, the leaves, twigs, and bark contain a mildly toxic, white milky, latex-like sap. Some people report adverse side effects, including diarrhea, nausea, bloating, dizziness, and constipation from consuming the leaves. If you’re new to the leaves, begin with just a small amount.

You can also use the leaves in herbal preparations for external use, like salves.

You should also avoid harvesting green or unripe Mulberries. Unripe berries contain the same white sap and may cause diarrhea and nausea. Some folks also find that eating a large amount of even ripe berries can have a laxative effect. If they’re new to you, start with a few.

My daughters Purple Stained Mulberry Fingers

Mulberry Medicinal Benefits

Herbalists have used Mulberry leaves in China and other Asian countries for 4000 years or more. Most frequently, herbalists use the Mulberry leaves in teas and tinctures to improve eyesight, support liver function, and treat dysentery, dizziness, coughs, colds, and colic.

A modern look at the chemical composition of Mulberry leaves also found that they can help reduce heart rate and lower blood pressure. Due to these results, researchers believe that “Mulberry leaves could be a promising therapeutic option for modulating cardiometabolic risks.”

Mulberry leaves may also help lower blood sugar and regulate insulin levels and may have the potential in the treatment of type II diabetes. A recent study gave adults maltodextrin, a starchy powder that rapidly raises blood sugar levels. Then some of the participants were given mulberry extract. Those who took the extract had significantly lower increases in blood sugar and insulin levels than those in the placebo group who didn’t receive any.

Young Mulberry Flowers

Herbalists may also use Mulberry leaves externally. Some herbalists find that Mulberry leaves are good for the skin and can help reduce the appearance of scars and age spots and soothe rashes, acne, pimples, and other irritations.

Foragers typically gather the berries of Mulberry trees for culinary uses rather than medicinal value, but they may have some impressive health benefits of their own. Mulberries are high in essential vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants, and eating them often may help improve heart, eye, and cognitive health. Modern studies have shown that Mulberries have antioxidant, neuroprotective, antiatherosclerosis, immunomodulative, antitumor, antihyperglycemic, and hypolipidemic properties.

The bark of Mulberry trees was also a common remedy in traditional European medicine. There, herbalists used a decoction from the bark to treat tapeworms or as a laxative. Some Native American groups also used the tree medicinally, employing the milky sap to treat ringworm and tea from the roots to treat dysentery, weakness, fever, and difficulty urinating.

Ripe Mulberry Fruit

Where to Find Mulberry

Mulberry species are originally native to North America, South America, and parts of Asia and Africa but have naturalized widely. Today Mulberries grow throughout much of the world’s temperate regions, including Europe and the Middle East.

Mulberry trees are habitat generalists that grow in full sun to shade, depending on the species. Some, like the Red Mulberry, tolerate shade better than others, like the White Mulberry, which you’re more likely to find in full sun. They thrive in nearly any soil type, including clay, sand, and silt, as long as it’s well-drained.

You may spot Mulberry trees in shaded hardwood forests, floodplains, bottomlands, savannas, thickets, urban and suburban areas, vacant lots, abandoned fields and farmland, or along stream banks, railroad tracks, roadsides, fence lines, ditches, power lines, ravines, and river banks.

When to Find Mulberry

While you can find Mulberry trees year-round, you will most likely spot them in the summer. Mulberries are deciduous trees that drop their leaves in the fall and regrow them in the spring.

The berries are generally the easiest way to spot mulberries and may appear from June through August, depending on the climate and species.

Earlier in the year, you can spot the unique underripe fruit clusters, which are a dead giveaway.

Underripe Mulberry Fruit

Identifying Mulberry

Mulberries are fast-growing, medium-sized deciduous trees with spreading crowns that may reach 70 feet tall. Their elongated clusters of tiny fruits most easily identify them. While they’re unrelated to blackberries, they look like blackberry trees when the berries ripen.

As there are no other North American trees that produce berries like this, it’s quite easy to identify them from their fruit within the United States.

Mulberry Leaves

Mulberry trees have simple, green, toothed, alternately arranged leaves that grow on short petioles (stems). The leaves may be heart-shaped, ovate, or variously lobed, even displaying all three shapes on a single branch. Leaves growing on saplings, stump sprouts, or trees in dry soil or full sun tend to be larger and more deeply lobed.

The size of the leaves varies with species. The White or Asian Mulberry typically has leaves that are 3 to 5 inches long on mature trees though they may occasionally be larger on saplings. The Red or American Mulberry has much larger leaves, which may be 4 to 12 inches long on mature specimens.

The texture of the leaves may also vary with species. Leaves on a mature White Mulberry typically have glossy upper sides though they may be rough on saplings. White Mulberry leaves may also have scattered clumps of hair on the may vein on the underside of the leaf. Red Mulberry leaves are never glossy, and their upper side has uniform stiff hairs, making them feel like sandpaper.

All Mulberry leaves contain a white, milky, latex-like sap. However, it’s not as copious as in milkweed or lettuce.

Mulberry Stems

Mulberries are medium-sized trees that may grow up to 70 feet tall, though generally average between 35 and 50 feet. Mulberries typically have many-branched, spreading crowns.

The appearance of Mulberry tree bark varies with species. For example, White Mulberry bark may be light brown to yellowish-orange with thin yellow-gray scaly ridges. Red Mulberry bark is reddish-brown or brown and fissured or split into scaly, rough plates.

Mulberry Flowers

Mulberries usually flower in the spring right as the trees are leafing out. The flowers are light green and rather inconspicuous. They are only about 1/8 of an inch wide and form in tightly-packed narrow clusters.

Male and female flowers may appear on the same or separate trees.

Young Mulberry Fruit

Mulberry Fruit

Mulberry trees produce tight, fused, elongated clusters of tiny fruits called “syncarps.” Mulberry fruits are typically 3/8 to 1 1/4 inches long, depending on the species. They look a bit like blackberries and dangle from a short stem.

The berries begin as green but ripen to white, pinkish, red, purple, dark purple, or black. The color may depend on the species and individual tree. The berries of the Red Mulberry are typically red to dark purple, while the berries of the Texas Mulberry may be red, dark purple, or black.

Oddly enough, the fruit of the White Mulberry tree is only occasionally white when ripe. White Mulberries are often pinkish, purplish, or purple-black when ripe. This feature and its similar leaves have led to the naturalized White Mulberry often being mistaken for our native Red Mulberry here in the United States.

Mulberry Look-Alikes

When not in fruit, Mulberry is sometimes mistaken for American Basswood (Tilia americana). However, Basswood differs in a few noticeable ways:

American Basswood is a large tree that may grow 60 to 80 feet tall.
American Basswood leaves are broadly ovate or rounded with long-pointed tips, notches at the base, palmate veins, long slender leafstalks, and coarsely saw-toothed edges.
American Basswood flowers in the middle of summer and produces clusters of yellowish-white five-petaled flowers hanging from the middle of leafy greenish bracts.
American Basswood produces elliptical or rounded, nut-like gray fruit that’s covered in fine hairs.

Another look-alike tree is Sassafras (Sassafras albidum). However, it too differs in a few easy-to-spot-ways:

Sassafras has gray-brown bark, which becomes thick and deeply furrowed.
Sassafras often has elliptic leaves and displays some un-lobed, some with two mitten-shaped lobes, and some with three blunt lobes on a single branch, but all the leaves have smooth edges and lack teeth.
Sassafras has a recognizable aromatic scent, and the leaves, stems, and roots may smell like cinnamon, root beer, sweet lemon, or fruit loops when crushed or broken.
Sassafras has clusters of yellow or yellow-green flowers.
Sassafras produces clusters of elliptical bluish-black berries, each held in a red cup on a long red stalk.

Lastly, the fruit of the Mulberry tree could be mistaken for Blackberries (Rubus sp.). Mulberries are distinguished from Blackberries in the following ways:

Blackberries grow on bushes with thorns (cultivated varieties may lack thorns).
Blackberries have palmately compound leaves.
Blackberries ripen to black and are typically more rounded and less than 1 inch long.
Blackberries typically ripen from late July through September, depending on location.

Ways to Use Mulberry

Mulberries are an easy wild edible to use because they’re tasty straight from the tree! While they have their unique flavor, can you use them in any way you’d use blackberries or raspberries.

You can process mulberries into smoothies, pie filling, jelly, jam, or preserves, though the stems can be tedious to deal with unless you run them through a food mill. Mulberry juice is also an excellent and tasty treat. You can use the juice and the pulp to flavor ice cream, baked goods, and candies. The juice is also suitable for fermenting into wine.

For winter use, the berries can also be dried or frozen. Mix Mulberries with apple sauce, pear sauce, or other soft fruit to make a tasty fruit leather. Some Native American groups mixed the dried berries with animal fat and pounded meat to create pemmican, a nutritious and calorie-dense food that is long-lasting in storage.

If you find that Mulberry leaves agree with you, they are tasty and mild despite their sap. Mulberry leaves are best eaten when young and tender and some foragers find those of the Red Mulberry to be more choice than other species. You can eat the leaves raw as a trailside snack or salad or cook them like other greens. Historically, mulberry leaves were also dried, ground, and added to wheat flour.

Different cultures have also used Mulberries leaves, bark, twigs, sap, and berries medicinally. You can incorporate Mulberry into your own medicinal practices by making teas, decoctions, and tinctures from the leaves, bark, or twigs.

You can also use the leaves externally. Experiment with creating salves, lotions, and infused oils from Mulberry leaves to treat skin irritation and inflammation. Historically, herbalists used these types of preparations for acne, rashes, age spots, scarring, and more.

Beyond culinary and medicinal uses, humans worldwide also use mulberries for wood and fiber. The Chinese have cultivated White Mulberry for over 4700 years as food for silkworms! The Choctaw people reportedly wove cloaks from the fibrous inner bark of young Red Mulberry Trees. The wood of the Red Mulberry trees is good for fenceposts, furniture, and agricultural implements.

Mulberry Recipes

Need a wild snack to take with you on the go? Try these Mulberry Pie Bars from Desserts & Drinks.
Cool off with this refreshing Mulberry Sorbet from Hunt Gather Cook.
Make a tasty and healthy drink with this simple recipe for Mulberry Leaf Tea from Daily Food Talk.
Use some of the tea you made to cook your next catch with this recipe for Trout Poached in Wild Sumac and Mulberry Tea from Edible Indy.
If you find white Mulberries, put them to good use with this tasty recipe for Dried White Mulberry Granola – Armenian Style from The Armenian Kitchen.
Put up your Mulberry harvest for winter with these easy-to-follow instructions for making and canning Mulberry jam from The Spruce Eats.

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