THE ORANGE AND ITS KIN.
Citrous fruits, which take their descriptive adjective from the citron, include also the orange, lemon, lime, and pomelo, or grape fruit. The leathery, yellow skin, pitted with dots that con nect with oil glands, and yield a pungent, aromatic fragrance, is a family trait always recognized. The pulp that surrounds the seeds is enclosed in papery divisions that part easily, making the fruit easy to handle after the skin is slipped off. The evergreen, not large, but very productive; the foliage glossy, and peculiar in being compound, with but one leaflet. The flowers, waxy and white, and very fragrant, appear while the fruit is ripening.
First in this great family of semi-tropical fruits stand the orange. Native of Asia, the wild orange was cultivated early, and carried into India and China with the drift of emigration that set east ward, while it also moved westward into Mediter ranean regions, and established itself in the sunny, mild climate of Italy, Spain, and the south of France. Then came the spread of orange culture in the West Indies, Florida, and Mexico. And last, but greatest, the establishment of the orange as a commercial crop in California, an industry which has made a profound impression on the orange market of Europe and America.
The remarkable thing about the orange of southern California is that the fruit is picked ripe from the tree, packed with the utmost care, shipped in special refrigerator cars, or compart ments in vessels, and delivered to the consumer in distant countries without change or deteriora tion in quality. It may be picked through a long season, so as to supply the market at almost any season of the year. The growers in this great new orange region of the world are people of high intelligence, who have founded their industry on the best knowledge obtainable. The experience of Old World growers has helped methods in use; but their prejudices and traditions have not ham pered the progress of the new horticulture.
Just as good horticultural intelligence developed the orange industry in Florida. The advantage of nearness to the great seaboard cities of the East, and cheaper transportation by sea, gave a great stimulus to the planting of orchards, and in 1894 six millions boxes went to market. Then came the freeze in December, and another in February, and orchards north of the middle of the state were ruined or badly damaged. Large plantings in southern Louisiana were utterly destroyed. This sad lesson taught growers the limits within which orange culture can safely be pursued, and it left the way clear for California to supply the defi ciency, by ever greater production.
The demand for oranges is large in the United States. California supplies 8o per cent. of it. The importation of Mediterranean oranges has largely given place to West Indian, and Ameri can fruit. England uses an ever-increasing quan tity of California oranges of the finest grades.
The Washington Navel is the great commercial orange. It is seedless, with a funny little wrinkled orange, no bigger than a berry, tucked into the blossom end. The divisions of the fruit are many, the walls thin, and the flesh sweet and fine flavored. The trees are small, but well-shaped and very prolific, beginning to bear early.
In 187o, a resident of Bahia, Brazil, sent to the Department of Agriculture in Washington three cuttings of the seedless orange, the principal vari ety of that country, grown for a century or more, but not especially good, and unknown in this country, because it is not a good fruit for ship ping. The cuttings were overlooked for some time, then sent to a grower at Riverside. Two of the scions lived when grafted on an orange tree.
Upon this new fruit the orange industry rests. The parent tree of the Washington Navel orange is now growing and bearing fruit in front of the Glenwood Inn, while trees by thousands represent the offspring of cuttings it has yielded in years past.