History of Oranges

The sweet delicious juicy orange is eaten all around the world and was born as a

sour fruit, growing wild in China. Dating back thousands of years, the orange was

probably being cultivated by the Chinese by 2500 BC. It may also have found roots in the

Assam area of India and in Myanmar.

Mysteriously, for thousands of years, oranges seem to have remained an Oriental

treat, not written up in the Middle East, or mentioned by the Greeks. Those which

reached the west in the earliest days were of the sour variety. Eventually the Romans,

always in the market for exotic produce, obtained oranges the hard way. After long sea

voyages from India, which finally brought young trees into the Roman port of Ostia, in

the first century AD. After the fall of Rome in the 5th century AD, orange raising. and

importing both died out for centuries. Orange trees were planted across North Africa by

the first century AD. The Moors, the Muslim natives of the region, brought oranges with

them to southern Spain in the 8th or 9th century, in their conquest. By the 1200’s orange

groves were a feature of an area extending from Seville to Granada, as well as regions of

Portugal. Another Muslim group, the Saracens, brought orange growing to Sicily, the

island off the toe of Italy’s boot, at about the same time.

The orange first ventured across the Atlantic Ocean in 1493 with Christopher

Columbus. Columbus carried seeds of the orange, lemon and citron, or possibly young

trees, from Spain’s Canary Islands to the island of Hispaniola, today shared by Haiti and

the Dominican Republic. Soon several of the Caribbean islands were raising oranges,

whether sweet, or sour or both, there is no record. Seedlings reached Panama with the

Spanish in 1516, and in Mexico two years later. The Native Americans living there

supposedly were intrigued with the orange trees and tended them with care. At about the

same time the Portuguese were planting sweet oranges in their enormous South American

colony of Brazil.

The Spanish brought oranges to their settlement at St. Augustine, Florida in 1565

and by 1579