Did you ever find yourself in an orange grove? There is nothing else so fine under the Southern sun; I do not say the sun everywhere, for an apple orchard beats the world for beauty–and a cherry orchard, full of crimson Maydukes and Black Tartarians, is also hard to beat. But under the Southern sky the orange is the best thing the sun and the soil can make, and it is a wonder that grows on the imagination every time you see it.
Never ask for an orange, but, just as you would in an apple orchard, name the variety that you prefer, such as Jaffa, or Ruby, or Golden Nugget, or Homosassa. The ground is covered much of the year, just as apples lie in a Northern orchard, and these that have fallen are the richest and the sweetest specimens, if not allowed to lie too long. You may help yourself as freely as you would under my Northern Spy trees and Baldwins. An orange orchard consists of rows of trees reaching about as far as the vision, each tree from twelve to fifteen feet in diameter, and nearly round-headed. The golden globes literally cover the tree, the leaves thrusting themselves out just enough to make the setting perfect. Up and down between the rows are piles of pine logs that look like railroad ties; and in case a frost is threatened these will be kindled to protect the trees.
Early sorts of oranges must be picked in November, and from that time onward the varieties are ripening until April; but there are two or three sorts that will hang on all summer, sweetening every day. The grower, however, expects his shipments to be finished by May first.
Oranges and grapefruit, as found in the Northern markets, are almost always plucked before thoroughly sweetened on the trees, and as a consequence Northern buyers rarely find out the delicious flavor of the perfected orange. The grower goes up and down his grove with shears and bag, and cuts enough of the choicest samples to fill his orders for the day. These are carefully poured into boxes in the packing-room, and then placed, one by one, in a sorter, down which the orange rolls until it finds just the slide that fits its size, when it moves to one side and drops into its own box. This sorter grades at least ten different sizes. It is a simple machine, but it works perfectly. The grower who knows his own best interests, never picks up oranges to ship, nor does he allow a single defective fruit to be bought. This leaves a large amount of oranges which can be sold in the town market, or given away. It has little cash value, and yet it consists of the most delicious fruit in the orchard.
An orange grove means simply an orange orchard. The earlier trees found in Florida stood where they came up, making groves, very much as the Iroquois Indians grew their apple trees–building their houses in the middle of the grove. You will still find in Florida some of these old-fashioned orchards, and some of the old-fashioned houses in the heart of the grove. This, of course, prevented that sort of cultivation of which the present orange grower is very fond. He runs his cultivator every few days so as to keep the weeds entirely out of sight, and the whole surface of his orchard is a bed of sand. When he has done picking he spends about one-fourth of his income on commercial fertilizers, which are sowed liberally and then harrowed in. This is a fad, for the old groves in which nothing was done but to dig about the trees and mow down the grasses, bore as fine fruit as ever left the state of Florida.
The few old-fashioned groves still standing compete admirably in quantity also as well as quality of fruit with those fussed over and fed to accommodate the manufacturer of high-grade manures. This does not mean that the orange tree does not need food; it means that such food can be provided in the form of natural compost at a rate almost costless.
This beautiful orchard is equally entrancing in blossoming season. Imagine two or three hundred trees, or more, literally one solid mass of crowded orange blossoms; white with a flush of exterior pink, and occasionally red. The volume of fragrance is utterly beyond description by the pen. It rolls, heavy and persuasive, before a dozen playful breezes; for there is almost always a touch of wind from the Gulf or from the ocean playing across the State. A single grove can perfume a square half-mile. You do not go as you do among roses, to smell here and there, for the sweetness comes to you. It offers itself to your senses, and to your judgment. It seems to own and occupy the world, and to have displaced common air.
Bees discover it from their homes in the woods, and they come in swarms. Every tree is alive with the honey-gatherers; but they get drunk with the delight, and it is said that they do not make as much honey from orange blossoms as from some of the common weeds. I am not so sure of this; they surely are as happy as even buzzing bees can be. It is a curious sensation that one has, moving through this volume of perfume and listening to the honey-makers. I know of nothing like it in the North, except when the lindens are in blossom; and then you get it, for the bees will work in the lindens all night.
This orange business is the very poetry of both horticulture and commerce. It has a way of fascinating people who are not otherwise excitable. The orange tree is so superbly beautiful, as it stands alone or in the crowd. It is not modest like an apple tree, nor retiring, but its beauty is aggressive and striking. The trees when full of fruit are like piles of gold, and yet you have about them no sensation of Mammon. You clap your hands, and you laugh, and you wander about until you are too weary to go on; and then you sit down on the dry sand or on the log pile. Every day you come back to this feast of color with the same unsatisfied sensation.
I am sitting now on my broad veranda, in full sight of a great orange orchard, and it is just at sunset. The sun across the lake is no more golden than the orchard itself. The moon and the evening star are swinging among the pines to the east of the garden, ready to renew the enchantment as soon as the sun has dipped below the horizon. The lake is a vast mirror, and the trees are as perfectly defined in the water as in the air above it . Cows are rambling in the distance along the water’s edge, browsing the new grass of January. When will the Northerner learn that the birds are wiser than himself? Here is room for all the frost-bitten farmers, where they may fill their winter months with peace, and also with profit.
Those who came here from 1880 to 1890 were merely exploiters, and had no intention of building homes. They proposed to exploit Florida as a place for growing oranges; expecting to get rich quick and then go back to the North to live. They came with money borrowed at twelve to twenty per cent. interest, invested it in pine lands, in which they immediately cleared room for orange groves. These groves grew satisfactorily until 1895. Small crops had been marketed. The trees were loaded with their first full crop; and the outlook was grand indeed. It was already picking time, and some thousands of boxes had already been shipped. Sorrento, my present winter home, could send northward forty thousand boxes during a single winter. Then, just as the harvest was ready, and wealth was full in sight, a blizzard swung around the tip of its wing, and in one night obliterated not only the crop of oranges but froze the trees to the ground.
The shock was more terrible than could have been produced by war or pestilence, for its work was complete. Thousands of settlers had simply nothing left. They had invested every cent of their own, and all they could borrow. They had nothing to show for it but dead trees, and the ground covered with unmarketable oranges. More than one dropped dead in his tracks, as he opened his door in the morning. He had burned his boats behind him, and had neither riches ahead nor could he gain anything by a new venture.
The large majority simply fled the State like a flock of sheep-deserting their lands and the cheap houses which they were occupying. There remained a few who were possessed of more or less knowledge of some trade, and could find work in the cities. To this day there are schoolhouses standing in the woods of Florida, where these orange growers sent forty and fifty pupils. The doors swing open to you, the blackboard is on the wall, and the melodeon still stands in the corner; but there is neither a teacher nor a pupil.
Those who are now turning toward Florida constitute a very different class of people, and have for their first aim the establishment of homes. They come with sufficient capital to carry them through the making period. Deserted homesteads are taken up, and little villages are strung along the railways. Gardens are made, and culture is divided between a large number of fruits, cereals and vegetables, instead of being entirely concentrated on oranges.
This orange land is right in the heart of Florida. It is totally unlike the border counties, not only in soil but in the character of its vegetation. The land rolls like Michigan, and may be said to be almost hilly; that is, there are very steep places, only they do not climb very high. The strip of land which constitutes the backbone of Florida is about one hundred miles long and about forty miles wide. Every hollow is filled with a lake, and these lakes vary from a few rods to several miles in width. The larger ones are stocked with fine fish; and harmless alligators show themselves occasionally, and have become rather pets and ornaments than otherwise. Nobody fears the ungainly fellow, and he quietly lives on fish and frog, with a possible dinner of duck.
Orange groves as they exist to-day are very largely those first planted, and regrafted or budded below the freeze. Such a grove will begin to bear sweet oranges in about three years, and will pay the owner for his work in the course of five or six years. My neighbor Hawkins’ grove has been rebudded for over ten years, and from two hundred trees he sold in 1908 twelve hundred dollars’ worth of splendid fruit.
New groves are desirable, because new sorts of oranges are being created by cross breeding or from seedlings.
You may look for many finer sorts in the immediate future, and Florida will very soon cease to send out a single box of oranges of poor or even moderate quality.
Can you make orange growing pay? That of course depends upon the man as well as the grove, but it depends on both. There are apple growers in the North who constantly fail, as there are strawberry growers; and these men will fail in Florida as they do in New York or Massachusetts. The planter must be adaptable to new conditions, for in this sandy soil, and hot climate, he must not expect to do with his trees exactly as he did in the North. More mulching is necessary, and, contrary to the current notion in Florida, less commercial fertilizers should be used. In other words fruit trees must not be whipped up and compelled to do their utmost at a time.
The true fruit grower keeps his trees on a steady growth, and asks of them to give him a good average crop. He feeds them with a compost of such material as nature is sure to provide. I am sure that this fertilizer fad will abate. However, the problem is hardly to be answered without considering what else a man can do in Florida. There are some wonderful problems being worked out in this new garden of Eden.
The peaches which we find in our Northern markets are from stock that has been traveling Westward through Asia and Europe for some two thousand years. In some way from Persia it got the name of peach; and these peaches do not fit themselves cheerfully to Florida conditions. A new race has been created by going back to the original Chinese stock, and out of this new race new individual sorts are steadily being originated. Then by the wind and by insects the pollen of the Persian and the Chinese peaches get intermingled, so that in a few years we shall have a race better than both, and suited both to Northern and Southern conditions. The Florida pear has a very similar history and a similar future before it. I have just planted a small orchard of the Magnolia pear, which, with the Kieffer, Le Conte, Smith, and a few more, constitute a new pear race. Meanwhile I am testing with my other citrus fruits, not only new oranges and lemons and grapefruit that have been originated hereabout, but those crosses that are being created by the Agricultural Department at Washington.
Something new is cropping out in all these directions every year. Meanwhile Mr. Munson, of Texas, sends me that wonderful new lot of grapes which he has originated from our native stock crossed with foreign. Then we have our figs and quinces and loquats and mulberries, as well as plums and cherries; and there is the apple problem still to solve. Croakers exist everywhere, and there is a cheap race of them in the South. They do not think that anything new can exist under the sun. Unfortunately for their wisdom new things are becoming the order of the day.
So you see that a Northerner may easily combine with orange growing, the growing of many other sorts of fruit, and he has a lot of chances as he has in New York and Ohio. I have a neighbor who has devoted himself to bee-keeping, and does as well here in the winter as he does in Ohio in the summer-that makes a whole year of it. Others find the raising of chickens or, turkeys homefully profitable. I cannot see very much difference between the pioneering to the South and that earlier pioneering to the West, only that here the soil is more easily worked, and more attention must be paid to creating humus-compost and mulch. It needs decision of character, trained self reliance, habits of investigation, and it needs also enough capital not to be stranded by the first frost or even freeze. A light frost may be looked for any winter, and a freeze may be looked for about once in ten years.
The pine tree fits to the orange admirably; calm, stately, and commanding, as the orange is homeful and serviceful. Seventy-five great pines, fifty feet to the first limbs, surround my house. In midwinter, when these are in bloom , whole swarms of bees are up there at work, and pine honey is not so bad after all. It has a taste of figs.
Twice as many of these old settlers stand at the rear of my garden, running down to the edge of Lake Emerson. To the right of me I have forty acres of pine park, and the lake front is neatly dotted with young pines in groups that look upward aspiringly while they throw their shadows into the mirror-like water of Lake Lucy.
Across the lake (about half a mile) the bluffs are crowned superbly with more hundreds and thousands of these health-breathing trees; and when the sun shines through them at night I have a comfortable feeling because they are mine. When the air is quiet below, a murmur and sometimes a roar rolls through the upper limbs of your pines, dropping down occasionally from the upper air to the ground. If you go out among these parks and groves you will find innumerable openings and sometimes half-acres of violets. It is a special charm of these pine woods that the trees rarely stand close as in a Northern deciduous forest, but much as they do in a town park, with plenty of grass and flowers and blueberries. Oaks sometimes get a footing, mostly of the willow-leaved sorts, and occasionally a huge live oak spreads its magnificent limbs, evergreen, and with the densest foliage of any tree I ever beheld.
I wonder always, as I drive through these forests, at the vast display of the beautiful. Who can ever enjoy these wild flowers, reach after reach of them and mile after mile? Is it for the insects alone, and for the birds and the bees that they are painted and perfumed? There is certainly a wonderful reveling here in nature; and I am sorry to say most human beings are unable to understand either the songs in the trees or the flowers on the ground. Yet it is these very things that have made us what we are. They have tuned our ears, quickened our sight, and sent joy into our hearts. They have turned savages into poets. Before the appearance of man on the globe vegetation was flowerless. No apple or orange or oak or maple enlivened the great monotony; not even the grasses that so clothed the fields. No bee made honey, and no flower furnished nectar. At last deciduous trees appeared, broad- leaved forests filled the lower zones; and it was time for man.
I came to Florida wishing to escape the power of Zero. I had foregleams of a log hut, in a pine grove, and simplicity sufficient to satisfy Wagner. I have the simplicity, and have escaped the biting cold. I have spent four winters in Florida, and have never seen a piece of coal, nor a house furnace, and have never longed for such a sight. As a rule the thermometer ranges between sixty and eighty-five at midday, but at night it drops to forty-five or fifty-five, and occasionally, that is three or four times in the winter, it will get down to thirty. The most delightful thing in the world is the big fireplace (I have four of them) and the dashing blaze of pine cones and pine knots. It takes but five minutes to make your bedroom or study delightfully cheerful for a morning bath, or for writing an article to OUTING. But the log house is all a dream; for of all places in the United States Florida is a place for a real house, the heart of a real home-not a costly house, but a retreat. Tourists skirt Florida, buzzing around the coast cities, where the mosquitoes control conditions, and when the conditions are too insistent, they flit for home. They know nothing about the real Florida.
There is always more or less smoke in the atmosphere of Florida after the first of January, for there are fires every day burn ing over the underbrush and grass within a few miles of you. For a full two months you will see in some direction a broad blaze creeping along the grass, and if the wind blows, sweeping furiously under the pine trees. The trees rarely suffer, unless there is a scar near the ground. Turpentine tappers are on the alert to prevent the flames from spreading among the tapped trees.
A precautionary measure is to hoe the grass away from each tree, and before this is done fires are illegal. However, the law is a dead letter and there are fires kindled as early as December. As the sun sets through the smoky atmosphere it becomes a huge globe of crimson, that one may look directly in the face for half an hour. To protect our homes and our orange groves, or gardens and fields that we do not care to have burned, fire lines are necessary, plowed about ten or twelve feet wide. These are a conspicuous feature of the Florida landscape.
Let us be honest, for Florida is not quite Paradise. I think the sour day is less tolerable there than elsewhere. We are not invigorated by the cold, only chilled. The walls of the ordinary Southern house let in mean little drafts that make balloons of the carpets. There is not much comfort in a brisk walk when the thermometer runs between thirty and forty. Many tourists run into spells of nasty coast winds, growl, and hurry back to Boston to get warm. There is, however, very little of this midway weather here in central Florida. We are rather grateful for half a dozen days in the course of the winter that let us down from the elation of sunshine and brightness.
Byron asked for one new sensation. Did he ever sit before a big fireplace, blazing with heart pine, a pile of new books at his right hand and a basket of oranges and grape fruit at his left? These are always to be eaten before meals. That is the rule here in Florida, and you may take as many as you choose. There is a fine diversity of method, and while we sit before this blazing fire we shall forget the wind-with-an-edge as we experiment; two or three oranges peeled and sliced; a couple eaten with a spoon; and finally as many more sucked from the blossom end. With oranges, books, and a bright fire, the sense of aloneness is lost, and the out-of-doors is forgotten.
The romance of orange growing I feel myself to the tips of my fingers. I should like to give a life to developing these citrus fruits, but I resolutely turn away, because there are so many more who cannot resist. They will plant orange trees with their last dollar. There is a magic about it, for it turns the roughest sort of folk into poets. It refines, and it quickens imagination . A man must be a clod who can go through my friend Zimmerman’s grove and not feel full of worship. Grape fruit, half the size of your head, hanging down in clusters, and the pliant limbs borne down low to the sod; heart-full, arms-full, heads-full; the trees are a solid mass of golden balls-fourteen boxes to a tree; while Zimmerman himself, bent down with age and work, travels down the orchard avenues drinking in the charms of his growing crops, but compelled every fifteen minutes to lie down on the ground and gather a bit of additional strength. Some day some one will pick him up, and he will have gone out of his orchard forever. Everything else in Florida is music. Wild phloxes cover the ground. Mocking birds laugh and whistle in the trees. Red cardinal birds shuttle through the green. The Indians felt all this; they were Seminoles; and not far from here flows the Suwanee River. A little farther are the Kissimmee, the Caloosahatchie and the Withlacoochee, while through the western arm of the State cuts deep the Apalachicola. Almost as soft on the ear are Pensacola and Fernandina and St. Augustine; for the Spaniard caught the spirit of the dream, but the Yankee builds Jacksonvilles and Gainsboros.
