The Mulberry Tree Project
Arnaud Lebert., Vivo Bene
On March 12 2022 fifty mulberry trees were planted in the grounds of Château Royal d'Amboise. A further one hundred and thirty will follow to complete the first stage of a much larger project to promote the cultivation of mulberry trees in the Loire Valley.
The project’s partners include The Saint Louis Foundation, Vivo Bene, Ville d’Amboise and Region Centre Val de Loire. It includes the planting of ten varieties of mulberry tree from Italy.
François Bonneau, Arnaud Lebert, Marc Metay, Thierry Boutard & Marc Bayard.
The date for the ceremonial planting was not random.
On March 12, 1470, Louis XI signed a letter at the Château to give the go ahead for a silk industry to be founded in nearby Tours. A local silk mercer, Jean-Baptiste Roze Moussard was appointed the king's adviser.
By 1605, there were eighteen thousand mulberry trees in the Tours area, By the 1700s, there were seven hundred thousand. Looms were spinning all over in the Touraine.
So called silk worms feed on the leaves of mulberry trees. It isn’t a worm, it’s a moth pupa which spins silk to make a cocoon. Around two thousand are needed to produce one pound of silk.
When royalty gave kudos to silk production, camp followers all over the Loire Valley planted hundreds of mulberry trees on their estates.
Area of planting, Château Royal d'Amboise
However, neither Louis nor anyone else could have foreseen that Martin Luther and his ninety-seven theses would take France by storm. Thousands of Protestants in Tours worked in the silk industry. When the Edict of Nantes was rescinded in 1685 and they were persecuted, they left town and all but took the industry with them.
By the time of the Revolution there were about a thousand looms left but even they didn’t last long. Silk, like the aristos who bought it, went, to put it mildly, out of fashion. Sans-culottes didn’t wear silk, they wore wool.
Miraculously one enterprise, Maison Roze in Saint Avertin, near Tours, managed to survive. The factory founded by a descendant of Jean-Baptiste Roze in 1660, now owned by Arnaud Lebert, is the oldest silk factory in France.
Post by Pamela, photography by Mark.
