Sweet Seville Orange

Citrus aurantium var. dulcis - Sweet Seville Orange

Among all the orange trees cultivated in the prestigious Parisian orangery under the name Bigarrade, the Sweet Seville Orange remains a singular botanical curiosity: it is the only one whose fruit is sweet and edible.

Prized in the royal collections of Versailles and the Jardin des Plantes, it embodies the Enlightenment's taste for rare varieties, cultivated more for their heritage value than for their yield.

This orange tree forms an elegant, upright tree, with a light and open canopy. Its slender, tapering, sparsely branched twigs are initially dark green, compressed and slightly twisted, with remarkable flexibility.

The leaves, a beautiful uniform green, are medium-sized, elongated, borne on a winged petiole that gardeners call "fore-leaf" due to its lateral dilation in the shape of a small leaf.

The aromatic glands, characteristic of citrus fruits, are so fine here that they remain almost invisible. A simple, rigid, oblique thorn grows in the axil of the leaves and persists for several years.

The flowers, small but intensely fragrant thanks to their essential oil vesicles, bloom in delicate clusters. The last ones to open often have only four petals and an aborted pistil.

The fruit, small, rounded, topped with a discreet navel, has a thick rind. Its pulp, sweet (perhaps too sweet, according to Poiteau), lacks the refreshing acidity that would make it a true table orange. Rarely bearing seeds in our climates, this variety remains above all a collector's item, admired more for its rarity than for its taste qualities.

This plate is extracted from the Traité des Arbres Fruitiers by Pierre-Antoine Poiteau and Pierre Jean François Turpin, a fruit encyclopedia published between 1807 and 1835, a major reference in 19th-century naturalist illustration.

It combines the rigor of scientific drawing with a rare artistic sensibility, characteristic of the great plates from the golden age of illustrated botany.