I've gardened around both fruitless mulberry and the truly horrid paper mulberries they used extensively here before they developed the fruitless type. Neither appeared to ever "poison" anything, but their roots are SO invasive and SO vigorous, they invade any pots which sit on the ground and densely fill any disturbed soil anywhere within their root zones. I know of no way to prevent it. My dad used to have terrible problems getting the danged Bermuda grass to grow near the trunks of the fruitless mulberries in his back yard. It was definitely a case of such dense roots robbing all moisture from the soil rather than root toxicity. Kim

Mulberries are in the fig family, and yes, the whole gang is infamous for dense, matted, wandering roots. Beales may be speaking from experience, but what killed his roses was starvation and dehydration, not alleopathy. IF the mulberry is fairly young, and IF the rose is old enough, and a robust enough grower, it MIGHT survive. I planted a Francois Juranville (it's an epically robust, rapid growing wichuriana) to climb into a mulberry, and it killed the mulberry, lol. But Francois, maybe Mermaid, and a few other monsters are all I'd take a chance on growing up into a mature mulberry. I'm afraid your musk rose hasn't a chance.

Dang. I really dug a GREAT hole, LOL. But thank you so much for the warnings. I actually planted the tree--it's a good distance from the house & the birds love the fruits. Yeah, I chopped some of those yeller roots as I was digging.

Old R. moschata will have to climb a cedar.