paper mulberry

Photo: Didier Descouens — CC BY-SA 4.0 · source

Survives zone 8 through 9

Harvest calendar

Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.

Sweet orange-red fruit with a flavor similar to true mulberry, though there's not much flesh to it and it doesn't travel well — best eaten straight off the tree. ⚠ Caution: Legal note: illegal to cultivate, keep, trade or transport anywhere in the EU (Reg. 1143/2014, amended by (EU) 2025/1422, in force 7 Aug 2025) — EU readers cannot lawfully plant it.

Hardiness

Zone 8–9

Habit

Tree

Edible part

Fruit

Ripens

Summer

Mature size

Suckering tree 10–15 m

Light

Full sun to partial

Soil pH

6.0–7.5 (lime-tolerant)

Environment

Temperate

Native range

China, Korea, Japan and Taiwan; carried across the Pacific by Austronesian voyagers as the raw material for barkcloth, and now naturalised — often invasively — across the southern United States, South America and Africa.

Status

Both wild and cultivated

Years to fruit

3–5 yrs

Growth speed

Very fast — 1–2 m a year when young, and it suckers hard

Spacing

600 cm (236 in) apart — about 36 m² (388 sq ft) per plant

Leaf shape

Alternate, variable to a remarkable degree on one tree: some leaves plain heart-shaped, others deeply mitten-lobed or three-lobed, 7–20 cm, rough as sandpaper above and softly velvet beneath.

Root system

Shallow, vigorous and aggressively suckering, throwing shoots many metres from the trunk and regrowing from any root fragment. This is the main reason the tree is a management problem where it has naturalised — cutting it down multiplies it.

Fruit description

A soft orange-red globe 2–3 cm made of protruding fleshy tubes, ripening in summer on female trees. Sweet and mulberry-like, but thin-fleshed, fragile and messy — it collapses on picking and will not travel, so it is eaten on the spot or not at all.

Propagation

Root cuttings and suckers are almost too easy; hardwood cuttings root readily. Seed germinates freely. Dioecious, so a female is needed for fruit — and a female is also what makes it a self-seeding nuisance.

Pollination

DIOECIOUS — needs male and female plants

The edible parts listed above are a starting point, not a field guide. Identify a plant with certainty — ideally against a local authority — before eating any part of it, and read the full disclaimer. Spotted something wrong? Report it.