History of Oranges

Series Summary

Gardening can be a fun and aesthetically pleasing way to help integrate your home with its surrounding environment. Using native and exotic plants, you can create a landscape that compliments your backyard and adds a sense of new life and freshness to your everyday routine. And no matter what climate you may live in, garden greenery is good for the environment, gets you outside and moving about, and teaches you just a little bit about life. In this free video series, the owner of a plant nursery provides advice for growing citrus fruits, including lemons and oranges. Learn about the history of oranges and find out how to grow an orange tree from seeds. Discover how to grow lemon trees outside and indoors and how to prune citrus trees. Grow fresh citrus fruit with these gardening tips.

Video Transcript

"Ever wonder where your delicious sweet oranges came from? Well here in Florida they were brought by the Conquistadors, the Spanish sailors who originally came to Florida. My name is Richard Skinner. I'm the owner of Hawkins Nursery. We've been in the business for about thirty years and the nursery and family has been in citrus ever since eighteen fifty five. North America, South America did not have citrus. The Spanish sailors brought seeds and planted.Why? Because they wanted fruit to prevent scurvy on their return trip to Spain. So consequently, not finding any here they brought seeds to plant it for the next sailings that would go along for years. Well, citrus has been in Florida and North and South America ever since. The tree I'm standing next to is a, we know is a Florida seedling but actually it originated from those Spanish sailors. This is the same orange that they brought. The trunk here has quite some size to it because it's a hundred and five years old. The citrus industry today, the different varieties derive mostly off of this in plain oranges now. The history goes back to actually in southeast Asia most of the scientists think and then was brought by seedlings and by cuttings all the way over in to the Mediterranean area which still has quite a citrus industry in places like Sicily and Cypress and Italy and Egypt and all along the Mediterranean there where we've got a semi-tropical climate which is great for citrus. Some of the tropics like citrus but different variety. You cannot grow citrus commercially in temperate zones that get in to freezes. So consequently citrus is a winter fruit by and large and we have many different varieties today. But this one was the old timey one that is basically where our history began here in Florida. This is Richard Skinner and this is the history of oranges."