Last year during a work day on the Apalachee Regional Park Trail cross-country course, both Brian Corbin and Bob Braman told me that they had spotted a tangerine tree in the woods. I was skeptical, but on one of my own trips to the trail I did spot several citrus trees. They weren't tangerine trees, though; they were trifoliate oranges.
If you take a walk in the woods near Tallahassee right about now, one of the flowering plants that you might spot is the trifoliate orange. Like the Chinese tung tree, the trifoliate orange is not a native species, but has nevertheless escaped into our forests where it's doing quite well. Right now you can spot the plants by their flowers, which look a lot like orange blossoms. Later in the year you'll be able to spot the plants by their fruit, which look a lot like oranges--if oranges were small, yellow, fuzzy, bad tasting, and contained more seeds than flesh. The trees are named for their three-lobed leaves, but someone should have considered naming them for their lethal-looking thirty-millimeter thorns. A hedge of these would be more effective than a barbed-wire fence, and about as attractive.
I was told years ago that the trifoliate orange was introduced as a cold-hardy rootstock for grafting more palatable citrus onto. The plants certainly tolerate the cold--trifoliate orange trees are found throughout the woods around Tallahassee, in spite of frosty north Florida winters that have driven the citrus industry deep into south Florida. Years ago there was an orange tree on the front lawn of the Florida Governor's Mansion. As pampered as it was, that tree has long since frozen to death. Out in the woods and cared for by no one, the trifoliate orange trees still endure.Links:
- USDA page on trifoliate oranges
http://plants.usda.gov/java/profile?symbol=POTR4 - Attractive University of Georgia page condemning trifoliate oranges
http://www.invasive.org/species/subject.cfm?sub=11571
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