PINEAPPLE

 A mid-season sweet orange with a distinctive pineapple aroma when fruit is ripe (mid-December through February), the Pineapple orange has long been a commercial crop variety, despite its many seeds (about 20).  The fruit’s diameter averages close to three inches. Because it is as sweet as a Valencia orange, and because it has such an agreeable fragrance, it has been since the 1920s one of the important juice oranges.  Cultivated extensively in Florida throughout the twentieth century, it has been one of the American strains with a global following.  It has a thin glossy skin and a tendency to pale on the sun side of the orange.  The tree, when it agrees with the soil and heat, tends to be prolific and vigorous. 

The Pineapple Orange was first grown on Col. Samuel Hamilton Owens’s Millwood Plantation in Marion County and named by his daughter Cornelia sometime in the decade following the Civil War.  J. L. P. Bishop, a pioneer of Florida citrus culture, creating the budded groves at Citra, around Orange Lake, visited Owens in 1876, tasted the fruit, which derived from an old seedling tree on the property—perhaps planted in the 1830s.  He found it so extraordinary that he purchased the tree from Cornelia for $500 to use for scion wood for his groves. [“Pineapple Oranges,” Augusta Chronicle (April 19, 1908), 32.] Bishop created the variety, propagating it and selling it to select growers at top dollar.  The original tree at Millwood did not survive the freeze of 1896, not all of the groves at Citra were killed, so from the trees in Bishop’s grove the variety was spread to Texas, Florida, California, and the West Indies.  It, along with the Parson Brown, was the most commercially important of the early Florida strains of orange. 

The Immokalee Foundation at Naples, Florida,  maintains the variety for propagation.  Texas A & M University also supplies scion wood for propagation. 

Image: U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection. Rare and Special Collections, National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, MD 20705, Elsie Schutt, 1911

David S. Shields