Orange Bigarade Cornue - Botanical poster 50x70cm

Citrus aurantium var. corniculata - Horned Bitter Orange

The Horned Bitter Orange captivates with its extraordinary deformity: its fruits develop horn-shaped outgrowths, bumps, and furrows that vary infinitely from one specimen to another.

No two fruits produced by a single tree are identical, and some remain simply bumpy while others sport true protuberances. Even more astonishing: Poiteau reported that the seeds of this bitter orange tree could contain up to five complete embryos nestled within each other, a botanical curiosity unexplained in his time.

The Horned Bitter Orange tree shares the elegant habit and floral beauty of its cousin, the Crowned Bitter Orange tree.

Its voluminous and sweet-smelling flowers are sought after for use in religious ceremonies. The horns that give the fruit its name are merely dilated rind: they contain neither locules nor seeds, but their presence sometimes deforms the inner segments.

Duhamel had hypothesized a correspondence between the number of supernumerary petals and that of the outgrowths, but Poiteau refutes this theory: fruit and petals do not have a sufficient organic relationship for such a link to exist. The infinite variability of forms makes each horned bitter orange a unique botanical object.

This plate is taken from the Traité des Arbres Fruitiers by Pierre-Antoine Poiteau and Pierre Jean François Turpin, a botanical 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.

• Each poster is printed using 12-color giclée printing, the benchmark for art studios for rendering fine tones, subtle gradients, and the most delicate botanical details.
• 200 g/m² paper weight, soft matte finish, 0.26 mm thickness: a result close to the original engraving, clear, glare-free, designed for hanging.
• Printed on FSC-certified paper, individually printed to order.
• Shipped in a rigid protective tube.