The Parent Navel Orange Tree

In the winter of eighteen seventy-three, a woman named Eliza Tibbets received a package in the mail. Inside were two small orange trees, propagated from a Brazilian variety the United States Department of Agriculture was experimenting with, rootstock that had been carried from Bahia to Washington and then out to California settlers who might test it in the soil. Tibbets planted them in Riverside. She watered them, in the early years, with dishwater when drought threatened.

What she grew was unlike anything California had tasted. The Washington navel orange, as it came to be called, was seedless, which no California orange had been before. It was sweet and deep-flavored, with a thick peel that held up to shipping. And it bore fruit in winter, filling a gap in the market when no other variety was producing. Within twenty years, cuttings from those two trees, just those two, had been used to plant virtually every navel orange grove in the state. Southern California, and the Inland Empire in particular, became the center of an industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars, all descended from a package that arrived in the mail.

One of the original trees died. The other survived and was eventually moved, when its original site was developed, to the corner of Magnolia Avenue and Arlington Avenue in Riverside. It still stands there. It is protected by a low fence and a historical marker. The tree is more than one hundred and fifty years old.

The industry it launched is largely gone. The UC Riverside Citrus Experiment Station, founded in nineteen oh seven and the basis for the university campus, grew directly from the citrus era. The groves themselves were converted to subdivisions through the nineteen fifties and sixties, when developers calculated that land under houses was worth more than land under oranges. The street grid in Riverside carries their names: Orange Street, Lime Street, Lemon Street. A monument to something that no longer exists, laid out in asphalt.