Valencia Orange in Decline + Origin of Sweet Orange

choi

David Karp, Valencia Oranges, Under Siege in California, Fight to Survive. Los Angeles Times, July 5, 2013.
http://www.latimes.com/features/ ... ket-online-20130705,0,1615508.story

Quote:

“Used for juicing and for eating fresh, Valencias have a few seeds and don't peel as easily as navels, but their juice has a richer flavor, and it doesn't develop delayed bitterness after a few days, as navel juice does.

“About half of California's Valencia crop is exported, mostly to Eastern Asia

“Citrus scientists classify Valencias as common sweet oranges: "common" because they don't have unusual features like a navel or red flesh, and "sweet" to distinguish them from sour oranges, which historically have been considered another species (Citrus aurantium). Valencia is the most widely cultivated sweet orange in the world


Note:
(a)
(i) Pauma Valley, California
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauma_Valley,_California
(in San Diego County)
(ii) Pauma Creek
http://www.topozone.com/map.asp? ... 341&datum=nad83
empties into San Luis Rey River.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Luis_Rey_River

(b) "The variety that would eventually be called Valencia was sent in the early 1860s from the Azores to Thomas Rivers, an English nurseryman. He shipped trees to a nursery on Long Island[, New York], which sent the variety to A.B. Chapman of San Gabriel in 1876."
(i) Azores
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azores
(an archipelago of of nine volcanic islands; located about 1,500 km (930 mi) west of Lisbon; an autonomous region of Portugal)

Quote: "Although it is commonly said that the archipelago received its name for the goshawk (Açor in Portuguese) due to its being a common bird at the time of discovery, it is unlikely that the bird nested or hunted in the islands. Some people, however, insist that the name is derived from birds, pointing to a local subspecies of the buzzard (Buteo buteo) as the animal the first explorers erroneously identified as goshawks.
(ii) Valencia orange
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valencia_orange
("The Valencia Orange is a sweet orange first hybridized by California pioneer agronomist and land developer William Wolfskill [1798–1866], on his farm in Santa Ana in southern California in the United States. Its name comes from the city of Valencia, Spain, known through history for its sweet orange trees, originally from India")

Why there is a discrepancy about the origin of Valencia orange, I do not know.

(c) "At its peak 60 years ago California grew 123,000 acres of Valencias, 90% of them in Southern districts, from Ojai to Escondido. Today just 38,000 acres remain statewide"
(i) Ojai, California
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ojai,_California
("Chumash Indians were the early inhabitants of the valley. They called it Ojai, which derives from the Ventureño Chumash word ʼawhaý meaning 'moon'")
(ii) Escondido, California
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escondido,_California

(d) "What happened? Competition increased from navels * * *; from many other fresh summer fruits; and from orange juice shipped from Brazil in supertankers. Consumers opted for more convenient packaged juice in supermarkets."

orange (fruit)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_(fruit)
(the most cultivated tree fruit in the world since 1987; section 2.2 Navel oranges)

Quote from this Wiki page:

“Probably originating in Southeast Asia, oranges already were cultivated in China as far back as 2500 BC. Between the late fifteenth century and the beginnings of the sixteenth century, Italian and Portuguese merchants brought orange trees [to] the Mediterranean area. The Spanish introduced the sweet orange to the American continent in the mid-1500s.

“The origin of the term orange is presumably the Sanskrit word for ‘orange tree’ (nāraṅga) * * * The fruit is known as ‘Chinese apple’ in several modern languages [Dutch and Low German, but not English].


(e) “The sweet orange (C. sinensis) arose through natural crossing thousands of years ago, probably in southern China or Southeast Asia. It is 5/8 mandarin and 3/8 pummelo, as scientists recently determined”
(i) Citrus sinensis (L) Osbeck; GRIN Taxonomy for Plants. Agricultural Research Service, US Department of Agriculture, undated
http://www.ars-grin.gov/cgi-bin/npgs/html/taxon.pl?10782
(“common names: blood orange, navel orange, orange, sweet orange, Valencia orange, tian cheng 甜橙 [etc]”)
(ii)
(A) Ollitrault P et al, A Reference Genetic Map of C. clementina hort. ex Tan.; Citrus evolution inferences from comparative mapping. BMC Genomics, 13:593 (2012)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3546309/
* BMC stands for “BioMed Central”--an open-access (meaning free) publisher.
* Read the section “Background.”
(B) Xu Q et al, The Draft Genome of Sweet Orange (Citrus sinensis). Nature Genetics, 45: 59-66 (2013)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23179022
(“The assembled sequence covers 87.3% of the estimated orange genome * * * we present evidence to suggest that sweet orange originated from a backcross hybrid between pummelo and mandarin