🔴 Invasive - Remove
White Mulberry
Morus alba
This is an invasive species that harms native ecosystems. It should be removed when found to protect local plant and wildlife habitats.
Description
A medium tree with glossy, smooth-topped leaves in a mix of lobed and unlobed shapes, and sweet fruit that ranges from white to pink to dark purple. It hybridises with and outcompetes our native red mulberry.
Where you'll find it
- Fence lines, alleys and beneath the wires and perches where birds sit.
- Field edges and vacant lots, often mixed in with the native red mulberry.
Background
Native to: China
Planted across the colonies in the 1600s and 1700s in repeated attempts to start a silk industry — it is the silkworm’s food plant. The silk failed; the trees stayed.
Ecological impact
Invades edges, fencerows and floodplains, and crosses with native red mulberry so readily that pure red mulberry is becoming hard to find. It also carries a root disease that harms the native.
How to identify
The leaf
Colour and texture: Glossy and smooth to the thumb, variable from plain oval to deeply lobed on the same tree. Native red mulberry is rough like sandpaper on top and dull, so run your thumb over the leaf before every cut.
Leaves: alternate, 2–7 inches, glossy and smooth on top (run a thumb across it), lobed and unlobed on the same tree, with a rounded base.
Twigs: slender, orange-brown, with milky sap.
Bark: orange-tinged, furrowed on older trees.
Fruit: blackberry-like, white, pink or purple, ripening May–June — messy and popular with birds.
Seedheads & fruit
Fruit June–July.
Blackberry-shaped fruit ripening white to pink to purple, on a short stalk.
Why it matters: It hybridises with and displaces our native red mulberry, so telling the two apart is the whole job here, and a stained pavement is usually how you find the tree.
Preferred removal method
Wrench the crown out
A woody crown too big to pull and too stubborn to cut: wineberry, multiflora rose, barberry, bush honeysuckle, tree seedlings.
- 1Cut the top growth back first so you can reach the base, then clamp the weed wrench jaws as low as you can, at soil level.
- 2Lever the handle back in one long, steady arc. Let the tool do it, not your back.
- 3The root ball should lift with the stem. Shake the soil off, and leave the hole; stamping it closed buries any seed you just exposed.
Avoid: Do not clamp halfway up the stem. It snaps, and the crown stays in the ground and re-sprouts.
Grab from the kit, in this order
Disposal
It can stay on site. Pulled saplings can stay, piled off the soil with the roots up.
Don't confuse with a lookalike
Native Red Mulberry vs White Mulberry
Red mulberry is a native tree in trouble. White mulberry displaces it and hybridises with it, so telling them apart is most of the job here. Both have wildly variable leaves, plain on one branch and deeply lobed on the next, so leaf shape tells you nothing. Texture does.
Red Mulberry
Morus rubra
Native: keepDull, deeply veined, rough as sandpaper.
