Taming Fruit by Bernd Brunner

Author:Bernd Brunner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2021-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

And though that place is 1,000 kos distant most of them arrived quite fresh. As this is a very delicate and pleasant fruit, runners bring by post as much as is necessary for private consumption, and pass it from hand to hand. My tongue fails me in giving thanks to Allah for this.

To date, no oranges have ever been found growing in the wild. One hypothesis is that they resulted from the cross-breeding of mandarins and pomelos. In any case, many people have sweated over the puzzle of the orange’s origins. The experience of the botanist Emanuel Bonavia can illustrate some of the difficulties they faced. Bonavia visited the orchards of Delhi to learn more about the so-called suntara orange. But when he arrived, he was disappointed by what he found: the orange trees that made up the “orchard” were actually scattered among the trees of the forest. The fruit farmers justified this setup by claiming that the orange trees liked shade and grew especially well under their taller counterparts. Undeterred, Bonavia continued his research. In his book The Cultivated Oranges and Lemons etc. of India and Ceylon (1888) he wrote, “I have left no stone unturned in order to get at the bottom of the origin of this sùntara orange, and possibly at the derivation of its name.”

A Spanish advertisement for oranges and lemons, 1929. Although no one could provide Bonavia with a final answer to the question of where the fruit came from, a certain consensus did exist on the topic. He reported, “All agree that it is not indigenous, and the legend has it that Hanuman, a general of Rama, introduced the plant on his return from Lanka (Ceylon). Some people say seeds were brought from Assam proper.” At a later point, however, he offered a different origin story when he noted that most authors believed oranges originally came from China or the region known at that time as “Cochinchina,” which today encompasses south Vietnam and eastern Cambodia. One thing is certain: oranges have been widespread in South and Southeast Asia for a very long time.

Today, nearly a century and a half later, we have a few more pieces of this puzzle. Studies by U.S. and Spanish scientists have narrowed down the list of potential birthplaces of citrus fruit. To do so, the researchers analyzed the genomes of more than fifty species, from the Chinese mandarin to the sour Seville orange, and even prepared a citrus family tree. The most important species in it are the citron, mandarin, and pomelo. And the place of origin has been narrowed down to the eastern and southeastern foothills of the Himalayas, a region of mild winters, intense sunlight, and relatively little rain. Tropical environments with high humidity make citrus fruit more susceptible to a host of diseases, so any place farther south can be ruled out, and most citrus plants do not tolerate frost.

LIKE THEIR COUNTERPARTS IN ancient China, Italian artists and collectors there were drawn to the sometimes irregular, fantastic forms citrus fruit takes.

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