Nagami Kumquat
NAGAMI

Native to Japan where it tends to be called Kinkan after its golden orange color, the Kumquat was always grown in the United States grafted onto Citrus trifoliata stocks.  Its fascination was the profusion of brightly colored fruits amid the deep green foliage.  Of the several varieites cultivated in Japan, the Nagami, an oblong-fruited variety with larger, more conspicuous fruit, became favored.  One novelty associated with the fruit was the practice of consuming the entire fruit--peel, pulp, and seed when eating.  The sour of the pulp played against the sweetness of the rind.  Early twentieth century commentators noted the emergence of a small cadre of cosumers who became fixated on the fruit, eating it habitually and exclusively.  "it has a rich tonic, aromatic flavor, and makes exquisite preserves. You preserve them as you would a cherry, or chrystalize them. It is an appetizing morsel fresh from the tree, and when dried possesses a stimulant to the mouth of man that is a substitue for and will break the habit of chewing tomacco" [W. E. Lankester, "Japanese Oranges," Riverside Independent Enterprise (January 23, 1900), 7.]

"Fruit small, about an inch and a half long by an inch in diameter, of a deep orange-yellow color; the delicate peel is sweet and spicy, and pulp tender and agreeably acid.  Tree very handsome and of peculiar growth; the branches are rather slender and willowy, without thorns; leaf small, narrow, oval or almost lanceolate, with plunted apex and petiole without wings.  Very productive [Catalog Glen St. Mary Nurseries 1894, 39]. 

Introduced to Europe by plant hunter Robert Fortune from China in 1846, specimens were forwarded to the United States by the Civil War.  While grown in the east outdoors as far north as Charleston, South Carolina, its market cultivation was restricted to Florida in the South.  It entered into general cultivation as a nursery plant in the 1890s. Yet the popularity of the dwarf Nagami kumquat as a conservatory plant throughout the United States, makes the geographic restriction of the variety to the extreme South and West nonsensical.  

Image: U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection. Rare and Special Collections, National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, MD 20705, Ellen Lower, 1909.

David S. Shields