Author’s Note
209 Words
Author’s NoteCitrus trees were cultivated by the Hebrews from about 500 B.C. There is a Talmudic legend that the citron was the fruit Eve offered to Adam in the Garden of Eden.
The word for ‘citrus’ in modern Hebrew is hadar. It is used in Leviticus 23, 40 to describe ‘the fruit of a goodly tree’ which grew in the Garden of Eden, the so-called ‘Tree of Knowledge’.
The ‘bitter orange’ was brought from the East by the Arabs and the Moors cultivated it in Spain. In England orangeries became fashionable in the sixteenth century and many great architects of the eighteenth century were commissioned to design them.
The Regency architect, Humphrey Repton, first designed top-lighting and also added the orangery or conservatory to the house.
The greatest difficulty in growing citrus was heating. Queen Henrietta Maria’s orangery in 1649 was lined with mattresses and reeds. An orangery at Ham House in Richmond used heat from a laundry arranged in the same building to warm the plants.
There are very fine orangeries at Warwick Castle (erected in 1780), at Burleigh House, first designed for Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Chamberlain in 1561 and replaced two hundred years later by the famous Capability Brown and the largest and most magnificent at Morgan Park was built in 1790.
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