Vendicari and the Citrus Before Time

Greater flamingos in the lagoons of Vendicari. Black liner pen and watercolor. Along the Ionian coast, in the far southeastern corner of Sicily, Vendicari is one of the few places on the island still largely untouched: salt pans, shallow lagoons, a big blue-eyed dragonfly with the wrong name, and flamingos stretching out so far they become strokes of pink and white. It is a good place to think about citrus before we started arranging it to suit us. Part V of The Citrus Kingdom goes back eight million years, to a fossil citrus leaf in Yunnan and the forest it grew in, then follows the four wild lineages—citron, mandarin, pomelo and papeda—that farmers have been crossing ever since into every lemon, lime and orange we know. Read the full article →