The Herbarium
Part IV · Fruit & vegetable
Herb. No. 215
Orange
Citrus × sinensis
Rutaceae
The sweet citrus of breakfast — a Chinese hybrid the world named after a color, or the color after the fruit.
Ripe fruit is food. Bitter orange (C. aurantium) and grapefruit are different plates for drug interactions; sweet orange juice is food.
- Parts used
- Ripe fruit · Juice · Zest
- Traditional notes
- Kitchen fruit · Juice · Traditional winter vitamin fruit
- Grow · USDA 6b
- Tender tree, USDA 9–11; a large pot north A nursery graft. Navels are seedless — you will not grow them from a pip. In work: Nov · Dec · Jan · Feb · Mar
- Harvest
- Fully colored and sweet. They can hang.
- Navel and Valencia on one patio is a long season.
- Protect from a single hard frost.
Safety
Citrus allergy Juice as a sole breakfast forever
Lore
The color orange enters English after the fruit, from Sanskrit naranga via Arabic naranj. Dutch royalty and the fruit collided in a flag. Florida’s groves are a 19th-century railroad story. A Christmas orange in a stocking is a northern memory of a time when the fruit was a gift, not a crisper drawer.
The Herbarium — a teaching catalog, not a clinic. Traditional use is history, not a prescription. USDA 6b dates are a week either way, not a promise. Do not eat, drink, or harvest a plant you cannot name.