"Oranges"

John McPhee is my comfort read.

• the Valencias, in their overlapping cycle, were in fruit and in bloom, a phenomenon of this tree, which blossoms fourteen months before the fruit is picked, with the beautiful result that a Valencia tree in spring is under a snowy veil punctuated by spots of bright orange against an evergreen field of dark leaves.
• In Jamaica, people halve oranges, get down on their hands and knees, and clean floors with one half in each hand.
li>Orange men, the ones who actually work in the groves... snap out the long, thin blades of their fruit knives and peel it down, halfway, from the blossom end, which is always sweeter and juicier than the stem end. They eat the blossom half and throw the rest of the orange away.li>An orange can be as sweet and ripe as it will ever be and still glisten like an emerald in the tree. Cold—coolness, rather —is what makes an orange orange.
• the needlessness and rich flavor of this unusual orange with an umbilicus at its blossom end
• Oranges float, but these have so much sugar in them that if you drop one into a bucket of water it will go straight to the bottom.
• When oranges breathe, there is no starch within them to be converted. Whatever sugars, acids, and flavor essences they have were necessarily acquired on the tree.
• A single citrus tree can be turned into a carnival, with lemons, limes, grapefruit, tangerines, kumquats, and oranges all ripening on its branches at the same time.
• In the late seventeenth century, Louis XIV installed it at Versailles. It died there in 1894, property of the Republic.
• So they went to a concentrate plant and filled two dump trucks with pulp from tens of thousands of Persian Limes which had just been turned into limeade. Picking through it all by hand, they found two hundred and fifty seeds, and planted them. ... They think it is fairly phenomenal that, out of two hundred and fifty seeds, Reece and Childs got two Persian Limes.)
• two grapefruit, either chilled or broiled, the latter with maple syrup and cinnamon on them, left in the oven until slightly brown on top.
• Lightning kills as many orange trees as any disease.
• It is possible that the gusty blasts of spray machines cause as much wind damage as wind itself.
• There are about thirty thousand named lakes on the Ridge, most of which began as sinkholes and most of which are almost perfectly round. Towns like Winter Haven and Orlando are polka-dot Venices.
• in altitude between the dead trees and the trees full of oranges at the top of the rise was twenty feet, if that.
• The citizens of Keystone City changed the name of their town to Frostproof.
• spray their trees until they are coated with icicles. This dramatic system sometimes works, because when water freezes it releases heat. Although the temperature of the air may have dropped to twenty-five degrees, water freezing on the fruit and foliage of an orange tree will hold at thirty-two degrees as long as more water continues to be applied.
• He has predicted fifty degrees for one spot and thirty-two degrees for another spot less than a mile distant, hitting it on the nose both ways.
• A picker has to pick each tree clean. An isolated orange that has been missed is called a shiner, because of the way it will shine like a light bulb alone in the tree.
• “You come from apple country.” In one sentence, he had defined the dimensions of his own world, the utterly parochial nature of it, its disciplined singleness, its weather, and its cycles of fruition.
• Nominal confusion also resulted from a tendency among Romans and Greeks to call any kind of fruit an apple.
• the prince, like the Byzantine governor of Rome nearly five hundred years before him, sent an embassy with the pilgrims to the Duke of Normandy, accompanied by a mountainous gift of beautiful oranges, frankly tempting the Duke to conquer southern Italy—which he did, taking Sicily, too.
• for more than three thousand years orangewood also continued to be a favored choice for the bows of archers.
• After the British Admiralty issued orders for regular rations of lime juice on all of His Majesty’s ships, British sailors became known as limeys.
• It was almost unthinkable for a great master to do a “Flight into Egypt” without lining the route with orange trees.
• It was also a symbol of the Virgin, erroneously derived from an earlier association that medieval theologians had established between Mary and the tall cedars of Lebanon.
• For the next two hundred years, a French reign was incomplete unless the king had built an orangerie larger and more magnificent than the one built by his predecessor.
• In Northern markets, there was considerable demand for fruit boxes stenciled with the words “ORANGES FROM HARRIET BEECHER STOWE—MANDARIN, FLA.”
• It was so sweet that it seemed just to melt away.
• Distributors there say they could sell many more oranges if the packinghouses would intensify the dye. In Florida, citrus men sometimes say of Midwesterners, “These people don’t want oranges. They want tomatoes.”
• If the concentrate plants bought oranges by weight alone, growers could plant, say, Hamlins on Rough Lemon in light sand—a scion, rootstock, and soil combination that will produce extremely heavy yields of insipid and watery oranges.
• Among the components that get boiled away in the evaporator are at least eight hydrocarbons, four esters, fifteen carbonyls, and sixteen kinds of alcohol.