Essay About Young Trees And History Of Oranges

History of Oranges
Essay title: 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