View - Roanoke Colonies Illuminated

Title	Mulberies
Caption	Morus rubra L. - red mulberry
Source	USDA NRCS. Wetland flora: Field office illustrated guide to plant species. USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service. Provided by NRCS National Wetland Team, Fort Worth, TX.
URL	http://plants.usda.gov/java/largeImage?imageID=moru2_004_avd.tif
Type	Drawing
Origin	Internet
Notes	Hariot; p.8 . . . in planting mulberry trees … Hariot claims to have found silkworms and proposes introduction of mulberry trees to promote production of silk. He could not have seen true silk worms, but must have seen the cocoons of other Lepidoptera.; The silkworm is the larva or caterpillar of the domesticated silkmoth, Bombyx mori (Latin: "silkworm of the mulberry tree"). It is an important economic insect since it is the producer of silk. A silkworm's preferred food is white mulberry leaves, but it may also eat the leaves of the Osage Orange or the Tree of Heaven. It is entirely dependent on humans for its reproduction and no longer occurs naturally in the wild. Sericulture has been practised for at least 5,000 years in China.; It was domesticated from the wild silkmoth Bombyx mandarina which has a range from northern India to northern China, Korea, Japan and far eastern Russia. It derives from Chinese rather than Japanese or Korean stock.[1] The breeding of silkworms cannot have originated before the Neolithic as the tools necessary to make use of the silk thread on a large scale only have become available since then. The domesticated and wild species can still breed and so hybridize together.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombyx_mori; ; Radford, 1968 p. 391 Morus alba L. (white mulberry) Introduced species most frequent about dwellings, throughout (southeast), used as an ornamental, for wind-breaks, and now widely naturalized.; Bellis Hariot suggests that there were trees other than silk mulberry (M. alba L.) that could be planted to support a silk industry. He does not mention the native mulberry M. rubra L. (red mulberry), which closely resembles M. alba but which is apparently not consumed by silkworms? The Wikipedia account, above, states that while silk moths prefer M. alba, they will eat Tree of Heaven and Osage Orange, neither of which are native to NC. [NB] Hariot doesn’t say he SAW the silk mulberry, only that they might be tried to support a silk industry.;

Mulberies