Commonwealth Network
My idea of an orange grove was of an orchard where the trees laden with golden fruit sprang up from a smooth, green turf "of broken emeralds," that invited you to sit down on the dapple of a shadow every few minutes and be happy; of trees with a tropic brightness of foliage that would dispose me to listen to such fowls as the bulbul and sing gay little canzonets in two parts. Now an apple orchard is a cheerful place; it is spangled with clover; its fruit is of all colors but indigo; it has robins and sparrows; its sturdy arms extend over you in a sort of pomonic benediction and invite you to perch in the Seek-no-further--or, as we called it, the signifider, but what signifies?--or the Pound Sweeting.
Nothing of all this belongs to an orange grove . The trees are tall, straight, symmetrical, not friendly in their way but a little stately, as if they should say: "Behold, we are oranges !" and not much more shadow about their roots than a Lombardy Poplar. There is no individuality. Every tree resembles every other tree. The earth is bare and tilled like a garden. When you feel like reposing in a well-weeded onion bed you can take lodgings in an orange grove . Driving through the splendid lines of trees numbering up to the tens of thousands, the whole year hung upon a single one, from the delicate white blossom that graces the bridal veil to the baby fruit, small as a walnut; to the tint of yellow struggling through the green; to the untarnished gold of the rounded and ripened fruit; the air, like a swinging censer, heavy with fragrance, and filled with the hum of bees; the lighter-leafed regiments of lemons, with their bright gilt orreries of fruit; the lime hedges, dotted with diamond editions of the full-grown mothers of lemonade; the cactus fences, all alive, slowly climbing over themselves in diagonals of serried pin-cushions; the bananas bursting into barbaric luxuriance; the earth terraced off for the water to flow in, and, this moment, coursing along the checker-work of channels and shining in the sun; the feathery plumage of the pepper tree, touched up with spangles and bugles of brilliant crimson and red; the fan-palms slowly lifting and lowering their great hands in perpetual salute,--all these scenes, lovely as anything in the vale of Cashmere, seem to rebuke your dear rugged home at the Eastward of Eden, and you grow grave when you meant to be gay, and are not quite sure a Rhode Island Greening, and a dough-nut with an orthodox twist, are not better than oranges , bananas and June all the year long. Here is an orangery of six acres, and five hundred trees fourteen years old, that filled thirty-eight hundred boxes the last season, and its owner sold the crop for six thousand dollars in advance. A man with a counterpane of a farm and six hundred orange trees can sit in the shade and draw a Star-preacher's salary without passing the plate. The orange is the true pomum aurantium of California, the "apples of gold" of the old Scriptures.