You win some, and you lose some, as the saying goes. Now quinces are perpetual losses. Lovely flowers, delicate pink and white; then some fruits set and grow a little. By now they have all fallen off. We are considering, of course, the real quince, that lovely yellow, pear shaped fruit, cydonia oblonga.
The other difficult fruit tree is the mulberry. Difficult in various ways; the chief among them being, perhaps that they are, it is believed, programmed only to fruit (in this climate anyway), at a venerable age. One book tells us that's why they are not common. They have to be well past their first youth before they fruit successfully. Indeed, the older they get, the better the fruit. That's a rather sweeping statement. In a letter to the English Field of 1887, it was claimed that the best fruiting mulberry in the writer's district was believed to be at least 200 years ago. Give or take a fair number of years, you might think.
Anyway, it's not a tree for those in a hurry. But at the age of about twenty years you could be for given for becoming a little impatient. And lo and behold, after almost writing the tree off for being the last to show even a leaf, after giving it hardly a look for weeks, suddenly it is found to be covered with ripe and ripening fruit. Abundantly. Amazingly. Unbelievably.
Now the berries are not like the huge loganberry type purple things that you walk over on your Mediterranean holidays. (One hotelier in the south of France got so fed up with people bringing in purple splodge on their shoes, that he cut down a lovely mulberry on the patio.) They are the size of your modest raspberry, but growing still, and some of them turning the correct shade of purple. This is the morus nigra. The bark takes on a mossy, licheny texture. It is a tree that spreads itself. And old age has a tendency to fall over. While recumbent it may still fruit well."
Once they were more highly esteemed," writes Herbert L. Edlin in The Tree Key (Frederick Warne), "and this explains why mulberries are often found on the lawns of old country houses, particularly rectories. "There's a subject for a monograph in those last two words. Buy a moris nigra if you can wait twenty years.