Garden series: citrus fruits : A biological work of art

Once Hercules and the "Apples of the Hesperides" in the hands. The wanted so many patricians of the Renaissance, many a Prince of the Baroque. With bitter orange houses – pomum, such as Apple, aureum, such as Gold – to emulated the Trickster of the ancient world. However, to date, it is questionable whether the mythical "Hesperidia", as Carl von Linné called those tropical Fruits that should survive in the Royal orangeries in the Cisalpine Winter were Apples or oranges. Botanists speak of the "armor-berries", if you mean hard-skinned citrus fruit of the family Rutaceae. The Latin Name derives from the cedar that early on as a cult fragrance had to serve, as later, the Zedratzitrone oil glands with their fragrance.

Claudia Schülke

Freelance writer in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

Theophrastus, student of Aristotle, described it 310 before Christ, as the first and called it "Melon medicon", the fruit was hot of the Medes, where "melon" Apple. Only in Pliny the Elder's account appears in the year 77 of our time, the word "Citrus". Up to the Medes in the Zagros mountains, the fruits were have traveled far. They came not but from the mythical nymphs in the West – hesperus is the evening star, but from the far East, where they developed in front of around eight million years ago, in the southeastern foothills of the Himalayas.

lemon as a cult fruit

, The Chinese Emperor, they cherished already in the third Millennium BC as a tribute payment. Has probably brought by Alexander the Great in the citron in the West? No, because archaeological excavations on Cyprus have promoted citrus seeds to light which are 3200 years old, and pollen analysis show that, in Cumae near Naples, already eight hundred years before the time of the turn of citrus plants were cultivated. Who brought her here: the Ugariter, Phoenicians, refugees from Asia minor, Aeneas? Historically there is some evidence that Jewish refugees from the destroyed Jerusalem, citrus fruit widely used fruit on the coast of the Mediterranean sea. Finally, they knew the citron as a cultic fruit of the feast of tabernacles. Moorish commanders introduced the Citrus in the eighth century in Andalusia.