Gerardi Dwarf

Gerardi Dwarf, also catalogued as Girardi, is the genuinely dwarf mulberry, and it solves the central problem with the genus: that most mulberries become 40-foot shade trees dropping staining fruit on everything below. It is a Morus alba by Morus rubra hybrid selected from the wild by Louis Gerardi and introduced by Gerardi Nursery of O'Fallon, Illinois. Its dwarfing is structural rather than a grafting trick: internodes are compressed to an inch or less against the five or six inches typical of a full-size mulberry, so the whole tree telescopes down to six or eight feet while the fruit stays full size. That compression also packs an extraordinary quantity of berries into a small volume of branch. It is now a standard offering at One Green World, Edible Landscaping, Cricket Hill Garden and a number of small mail-order fruit nurseries, and it is the mulberry most often recommended for containers, patios and small urban lots.