ISSUE 25, CITRUS, Part 1: Florida and the Creation of American Citrus Varieties

A History

Florida and the Creation of American Citrus Varieties

First was the bitter Seville Orange. The Moors had brought it into Spain during the 12th century.  Its great virtue, before the widespread cultivation of sugar, was the fragrance of its blossoms instilled into  Orange water and Neroli oil, an important component of perfumes. Columbus brought citrus to Hispaniola. The orange was established in Mexico by 1562 and Brazil in 1587. The missionary orders brought naranja acida to St. Augustine before 1600. Seedling groves were cultivated in the fertile lands around the St. Johns River and along the coast.  The Natives sampled the trees and spread them northward into South Carolina, where they naturalized and became the wild sour orange found in the Lowcountry.  In Florida the bitter orange flourished.  After East Florida became a British territory in 1763 after the 7 years War, Florida’s bitter oranges were exported to London for the manufacture of marmalade. The trees flourished, surviving into the American period in the 19th century, growing large, old,  and heavy laden until the freeze of 1835 when the ancient trees of the colony’s antiquity perished to the ground.  The old plantings of bitter orange would be greatly consequential for the establishment of the citrus industry, for the root stocks would be employed in budding the Asian sweet orange.

1835 was the pivotal moment in Florida citrus history.  The freezing of the ancient trees prompted many cultivators to consider abandoning fruit growing and converting the orchards to sugar cane fields.  The engineer and later mayo of St. Augustine, Francis Dancy, nearly single handedly tipped the balance in favor of citrus.  He instructed planters to cut the freeze blasted trees back to the stumps and wait. Patience was rewarded with the regrowth of most of the antique groves.  Furthermore Dancy preached crop diversification. Emulating the experiments of T. H. Shaw on Amelia Island, Dancy planted lemon trees—he would eventually have 3,000 lemon trees in his orchards on the east bank of the St. Johns River.  But not before he figured out a way to neutralize the depredations of the scale insect.  Trained at the U. S. Military Academy, Dancy, and indeed many of the big planters in North Florida fought for the Confederacy.  When disbarred from politics and a range of public employments by the terms of Reconstruction, Dancy and his cohort redirected their immense energies into building the citrus industry.  Most of his compatriots concentrated on varieties of the Asia sweet orange.  Dancy sought to create a new brand.  Finding in 1867 a superlative seedling of a mandarin orange tree secured by a neighbor from Tangiers, Dancy dubbed the easily peeled brightly agreeable fruit, the tangerine.  And the Dancy tangerine remains among the most consequential fruits every created in Florida—ripening in time of the Christmas trade, small enough to fit into a child’s hand.  It would become the parent of many important subsequent fruits. 

As if these labors were not enough, Dancy promoted the growing of lime trees after the war, wrote articles on site selection for orange groves,  he was the great prophet of the asexual propagation of citrus varieties.  Railing against seedling groves with their variability and their vulnerability to the pollen of myriad new sorts of citrus being imported into Florida. The Botelha came from England, The Creole from Louisiana, the Du Roi from Europe, the Dulcissima from Paris, The Blood from Malta, the Navel from Bahia, Brazil, the Sustain from England, the St. Michael’s from the Azores, the Tahiti from the South Seas.  The winds of the citrus growing areas of Florida filled with foreign pollen.   So Dancy championed budding citrus and used his own properties as demonstration farms.  His efforts transformed the practice of Florida citrus growing. 

Pomology in the 19th century was the most global and literary of any branch of experimental growing.  Florida’s large citrus growers monitored publications on four continents for notices of promising varieties.  The sweet oranges in particular obsessed growers and they obtained early on the most consequential kinds. Let me remind people here that oranges were naturally occurring hybrids of the mandarin (Citrus reticulate) and the pomello (Citrus maxima).  There are four categorizations of orange: the hard to peel round oranges; navel oranges, blood oranges, and acidless oranges—seeded and seedless varieties exist for each of the four categories.  Before we turn to Florida’s greatest creations in the world of citrus, we should spend a moment reviewing the most consequential of the introductions that took place in the mid-1800s. 

The Valencia Orange was the classic round orange:  The late maturing sweet orange came into notice in both Florida and California in the 1870s.  While its origins appear to be Chinese, it came into the hands of London nurseryman Thomas Rivers who forwarded it to General Sanford of Patalka, Florida in 1870.  Six years later the same broker provided A. B. Chapman of San Gabriel, California, with trees.  Chapman would disseminate bud wood to growers throughout California.  The variety had different names in both locales, being called Hart's in Florida and Rivers Late in California until Chapman, crediting the opinion of a Spanish grower, that the fruit was "La Naranja tarde de Valencia," renamed the fruit the Valencia Late.  In the last decade of the 19th century the "Late" was dropped and it became the Valencia sweet orange.

The Washington Navel Orange was the classic Navel variety.  A crop orange of the first importance, this nearly seedless orange came to the United States from Brazil, imported by the USDA's first horticulturist, William Sanders, in 1870.  Three trees shipped to Mrs. L. C. Tibbetts of Riverside, California, became the basis of an immense industry in Navel oranges grown throughout California, in Florida, in Australia, and South Africa. The legend of how the orange came to Bahai, Brazil, is one of the great orange origination tales.  A portuguese monk secured a rare orange from India and brought it to the New World, where with centuries of careful management it became known as the "selected orange."  In 1800 a branch of a selected orange mutated, producing seedless fruit.  Propagated by bud grafting, this became a favorite orange of Brazilians, a source of pomological pride, the Bahia Orange.  Saunders read about the Brazilian fruit, securing trees in 1868.  None of the original shipment survived.  A second shipment in 1870 became the basis of the Navel orange strain in the United States.  Because the fruit has been posted from Washington, D. C., to Riverside, it came to be known as the Washington Navel orange.  

The Malta Blood Orange is a fruit whose origins are shrouded in mysteries--including legends of pomegranates being grafted on orange trees and the injection of iron in the soil of an orange trees roots, the famous fruit with the crimson tinged flesh probably appeared as a spontaneous sport of the common oblong sweet orange grown on the island.  It was propagated by bud grafting and any epigentic tendency toward intensity and pervasiveness of blood coloring was encouraged.  There are debates about when it first appeared as one of the featured cultivars of Malta.  It was certainly established in the first quarter of the 19th century, so is 18th century in origin at latest.  It was one of the European varieties most avidly sought by pomologists in California, Texas, and Florida.  It was in cultivation in California and Florida by 1870.  Indeed the differences in coloration found in fruits cultivated in different areas became one of the first systematic tracking of the influence of terroir on fruits.

The acidless orange because of its propensity to spoil has never been a consequential commercial category in the United States.

So now the Florida’s contributions to the orange.  Let me begin with the productions of the Jacksonville region:  NONPAREIL This Florida produce orange derived from a seedling discovered by Mary Richard of Arlington River, Duval County, Florida shortly after the Civil War. It was recognized in the American Pomological Society's register of fruits for 1871.  In 1878 it took first prize in the Florida State Fair for the best peck and the best 10 oranges, an award that rivetted growers' attentions on the fruit. The fruit's handsomely colored flesh and reddish orange skin made it distinctive.  Combined with winning taste, the variety she called Nonpareil to honor its exceptional quality quickly spread through the groves of Florida becoming a crop.  "Nonpareil.—Size about medium; somewhat flattened; color ordinary; eye broad and set in a slightly depressed cavity; stem inserted in a level, scarred surface; skin three-sixteenths thick; longitudinal diameter two and three-quarters of an inch; transverse diameter three, and a quarter; color of flesh ordinary; grain fine; pulp melting and tender; juice sub-acid and vinous; quality good.'

South of Jacksonville in Marian Country another significant crop variety emerged: The PINEAPPLE A mid-season sweet orange with a distinctive pineapple aroma when fruit is ripe (mid-December through February), the Pineapple orange has long been a commercial crop variety, despite its many seeds (about 20).  The fruit’s diameter averages close to three inches. Because it is as sweet as a Valencia orange, and because it has such an agreeable fragrance, it has been since the 1920s one of the important juice oranges.  Cultivated extensively in Florida throughout the twentieth century, it has been one of the American strains with a global following.  It has a thin glossy skin and a tendency to pale on the sun side of the orange.  The tree, when it agrees with the soil and heat, tends to be prolific and vigorous.  The Pineapple Orange was first grown on Col. Samuel Hamilton Owens’s Millwood Plantation in Marion County and named by his daughter Cornelia sometime in the decade following the Civil War.  J. L. P. Bishop, a pioneer of Florida citrus culture, creating the budded groves at Citra, around Orange Lake, visited Owens in 1876, tasted the fruit, which derived from an old seedling tree on the property—perhaps planted in the 1830s.  He found it so extraordinary that he purchased the tree from Cornelia for $500 to use for scion wood for his groves. [“Pineapple Oranges,” Augusta Chronicle (April 19, 1908), 32.] Bishop created the variety, propagating it and selling it to select growers at top dollar.  The original tree at Millwood did not survive the freeze of 1896, not all of the groves at Citra were killed, so from the trees in Bishop’s grove the variety was spread to Texas, Florida, California, and the West Indies.  It, along with the Parson Brown, was the most commercially important of the early Florida strains of orange. 

My the 1880s Tampa began to rival Jacksonville as a center of citrus creation.  The reputation of the region was established by the Homosassa Orange, a creation of 1872 created by the ingenious breeded David Yulee.  But the great orange produced in that region was the aforementioned Parson Brown. The first variety of sweet orange to be propagated by budding in Florida, the Parson Brown orange derived from one of five seedling trees owned by Parson Brown in Sumter County.  Captain J. L. Carney selected plant material from the best tasting of Brown's trees and grafted grafted it onto wild orange stocks. The five trees had been given to tBrown in 1861 as 18 inch long plants by a traveller from Savannah who reported that they had been taken off a vessel from China at that port.  Subsequent to 1875 the Parson Brown orange was disseminated widely, and its reputation was such that many claimed that the sweet orange they grew were Parson Browns, particularly after the freeze of 1895-96. Parson Brown remained an important commercial variety because of its early maturation.  Even though it was seedy, it was processed into orange juice.  The fruit is rounded and can tend to oblong, medium to large size, with a smooth yellow orange rind. The flesh is juicy, coarse grained, and agreeable in flavor.  

As these extraordinary creations suggest, the world of citrus boomed in North and Central Florida, attracting northern capitalist and talent.  The boom continued until the growing season of 1894-95 when two brutal freezes two months apart decimated the groves.  The destruction was so thorough and general that many abandoned north Florida growing.  One man was largely responsible for the reconsolidation of north Florida growing—G. L. Taber of Glen St. Mary’s Nursery.  Taber had established himself as a major force in Florida citrus well before the freeze.  It was he who recognized the plant breeding genius of Lue Gim Gong, the Chinese horticulturist who cross bred the Valencia with the Mediterranean sweet to create a strain of Valencia that would come to dominate the market.  Gong’s greatest contributions to citrus breeding were the creation of frost tolerant varieties of grapefruit and orange.  This was of the greatest consequence because Taber in the wake of the 1895 freeze promoted the turn of north Georgia citrus to cold tolerants varieites—particularly satsuma oranges, Kumquats, and temple oranges. 

But it is the grapefruit that I would like to draw particular attention to.  In certain respect the citrus fruit that Florida is most responsible for making a global cultivar.  And it is a fruit whose popular consumption is now declining, because of its interactions with certain medicines,  and whose place in Florida’s fields is threatened by the Greening disease.  The grapefruit did not originate in Florida—but in Barbadoes, where this cross between a Jamaican sweet orange and an Indonesian pomelo took place sometime in the 18th century.  It was brought to Green Springs Florida between present-day Orlando and Daytona Beach in 1809 by the quasi legendary Hispanic nobleman Count Odette Phillipe.  A seedling from this master tree was transplanted to Safety Harbor near Tampa in 1830.  This would be the ancestor of the first great grapefruit strain and one of the most superb of all American fruit, the Duncan Grapefruit.  The first strain of grapefruit that was propagated by clonal reproduction, the Duncan Grapefruit is a first generation variety of this category of citrus in the United States.  The master tree at Safety Harbor, FL, and was replicated and branded by A. L. Duncan of Dunedin, FL in 1891-92.  From the first it found itself it competition with the seedless Marsh Grapefruit for consumer interest.  This famous seedless grapefruit found in the 1850s as a seedling in Lakeland, Florida, was promoted after the Civil War by nurseryman C. M. Marsh; the Marsh grapefruit became the byword of convenience in fresh consumption of the fruit.  The Duncan, however, was sweeter, and despite its many seeds, it found broad acceptance, both by eaters of the fresh fruit and by juice producers.  The Marsh because of the convenience of its seedlessness dominated the groves of Florida and Texas, yet anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of total cultivation was devoted to the more refined tasting Duncan.  Both varieties were exported to the West Indies and South America and would be planted in roughly similar proportions as in the United States until the last quarter of the twentieth century when the immense popularity of red seedless grapefruit’s marginalized the Duncan into a hobbiest’s tree or a gourmet citrus offering (similar to the Dancy tangerine). In the groves the Duncan came to be grafted onto sour orange or rough lemon stocks.  Its repute among citrus growers was such that everyone planted a Duncan for personal consumption, even when they grew Marsh for market. 

I’ve sketched here something of the first age of Florida citrus, highlighting its great creations.  The second age of Florida citrus began in the 1910s when scientific breeding gave rise to new citrus types—such as the tangelo—created by W. T. Swingle of the USDA by crossing two of the signature Florida fruits of the first age, the Dancy Tangerine and the Duncan Grapefruit.  Another mark of the second age was the focus of citrus production for juice rather than fruit.  Another feature was a consciousness that Florida had to compete with California for the national market. 

There are other wonderful citrus varieties that Florida created in the golden age of its creativity: The McCarty Grapefruit, The Hamlin Orange, The Lamb and Perrine lemons,  the Cameron Lime.  But I wanted to call your attention to the classics in the canon—and if you can taste a Duncan Grapefruit, I pineapple orange, a Dancy Tangerine, a Mineola Tangelo, a Lue Gim Gong Valencia, then your lips have kissed the best that the sunshine state can offer.