Cultivation
Cultivation of white mulberry for silkworms began over four thousand years ago in China. In 2002, 6,260 km2 of land were devoted to the species in China.
The species is now extensively planted and widely naturalized throughout the warm temperate world. It has been grown widely from India west through Afghanistan and Iran to southern Europe for over a thousand years for leaves to feed silkworms.
More recently, it has become widely naturalized in urban areas of eastern North America, where it hybridizes readily with a locally native red mulberry (Morus rubra). There is now serious concern for the long-term genetic viability of red mulberry because of extensive hybridization in some areas. As a result, it is listed as an invasive plant in parts of North America.
Read more about this topic: Morus Alba
Famous quotes containing the word cultivation:
“We Russians have assigned ourselves no other task in life but the cultivation of our own personalities, and when we’re barely past childhood, we set to work to cultivate them, those unfortunate personalities.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)
“We are on a mission: we are called to the cultivation of the earth.”
—Novalis [Friedrich Von Hardenberg] (1772–1801)
“The cultivation of one set of faculties tends to the disuse of others. The loss of one faculty sharpens others; the blind are sensitive in touch. Has not the extreme cultivation of the commercial faculty permitted others as essential to national life, to be blighted by disease?”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)