Published by American Palate
A Division of The History Press
Charleston, SC
www.historypress.com
Copyright 2019 by Erin Thursby
All rights reserved
Front and back cover images of oranges are released free of copyrights under Creative Commons CC0: https://pixabay.com/en/oranges-fruits-orange-tree-1117628; https://pxhere.com/en/photo/1152003. Front cover image of moving an orange tree at Flamingo Groves courtesy of Broward County Historical Archives, Hollywood (FL) Souvenir Collection. Back cover image of a postcard showing pickers at work in an Indian River Orange Grove (1898) courtesy of Detroit Publishing Company Collection, Library of Congress.
First published 2019
E-book edition 2019
ISBN 978.1.439668.085
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019943507
print edition ISBN 978.1.467141.192
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AN ORANGE GROVE, NOT AN ORCHARD
Florida orange tree plantings go back five centuries. They are so ingrained in the culture of the state that many believe theyre a native fruit. Even the very name we use to refer to groupings of cultivated oranges is a testament to that belief, for we call them groves and not orchards.
Wherever the Native American population lived in Florida, oranges grew as well. The Seminoles got orange seeds through trade with the Spanish from the late 1500s through the mid-1800s, so the white settlers of the 1800s found groves already growing all over the state, ready to be thinned out and grafted with sweet oranges.
These copses of thin, sapling-like orange trees grew densely. This seemingly natural growth planted by the Seminoles is probably the reason why we call it a grove here in Florida. Today, the word grove can be nearly interchangeable with the word orchard. By the older, stricter definitions, an orchard is a planted or cultivated area of fruits or nuts, but a grove is wildor at the very least less ordered. Californians will sometimes call it an orange orchard, which to any Floridian just sounds incredibly wrong.
Because the stands of orange trees were thought by some to be the result of natureand, in any case, unorganized, not in neat rows like a traditional orchardsettlers called them groves. Even after white settlers cleared out dense parts, keeping the best trees for their rootstock, trees still werent in rows, as farmers wouldnt move a good tree if they could help it (although they would sell some of the ones they moved for rootstock elsewhere). These early groves looked untamed, even when they werent, and the implication is that groves are more natural than orchards, something thats well in line with the marketing of the Florida orange, even as far back as the 1880s. The word orchard was sometimes used in the promotional pamphlets and books before 1900, but the word grove was used as well, eventually eclipsing orchard.
Citrus crate labels (which had their heyday sometime between 1920 and World War II) often featured Native Americans. 1932. Brenda Eubanks Burnette personal collection.
And so, grove became the word for any grouping of orange trees in Florida, even when growers set rows neatly. Usage of the word grove coupled with orange has spread far beyond the bounds of Florida. Most people in the United States at least, are far more likely to call an orange orchard a grove.
The vast majority of the groves grown by the Seminoles produced oranges of the sour or bitter kind, what the Spanish mainly grew in the early days, not sweet oranges. But even after the Seminoles got ahold of sweet seeds, those groves still tended not to be sweet. This is for two reasons. First, most of the sweet oranges from the 1500s through the early 1900s were not cold-hardy enough to survive, which is why growers learned to keep sour and bitter as the rootstock, grafting or budding on the sweet type to the tree. Secondly, growing from seed when it comes to oranges doesnt necessarily result in the fruit being the same as the parent, except in the case of a special mutation.
Orange seeds, as in most fruit, are the result of sexual reproduction in nature from cross-pollination, and each seed might have wildly different characteristics than the very orange it is inside. You might plant the seed and find this tree has thorns where the parent had none or bitter fruit where the parent was sweet. This is why, once a new and tasty orange was grown, the trees were valuablegrowers used cuttings to propagate what are essentially clones, which can then be grafted or budded onto rootstock.
The sour oranges grown by the Spanish in the early 1500s were thought of as less culinary and more medicinal or essential, although that had changed by the end of the century, and oranges, sweet or sour, were becoming popular in Spanish beverages and cuisine. Sweet oranges were not unknown in the 1500s, and even though they had been cultivated in various parts of the world for centuries prior, their discovery by the Portuguese in the late 1400s spurred their popularity.
The real leap forward in orange cultivation for Florida came in the form of grafting or budding, a technique that firmly took hold by the first half of the 1800s. Even today, the budwood is taken from a proven sweet orange tree, tender shoots to be cut into the heartier rootstock. Most commercial concerns order budwood from a proven source.
Fifty years ago, the rootstock might have been sour orange, bitter orange or rough lemon, but growers, looking to stay ahead of all the latest diseases and problems plaguing citrus, seek resistant rootstocks. The Cleopatra Mandarin became popular years ago but is being replaced by less romantically named numbered rootstock from the Department of Agriculture and the Citrus Research and Education Center. A nursery might be maintained by the grower, but the seedling rootstock and budwood come from specialists who concentrate on producing them. Because of scourges such as greening, standards and laws for budwood are strict.
