178 Fruits and Fruit- Trees. 



They grew to be eighteen feet high, and being protected 

 during the winter by means of moveable sheds, lived to 

 be nearly a hundred and fifty years old, or till killed by 

 the terrible frost of 1739-40. So greatly esteemed thence- 

 forwards were orange-trees, that the desire to possess 

 them seems to have led the way to that capital invention, 

 the Greenhouse. No plants were more cherished in the 

 conservatories, such as they were, of the time of William 

 and Mary, and Queen Anne. When decorative ever- 

 green shrubs of any kind were but few, and tender 

 exotic plants of any description were scarcely known, it 

 was natural that orange-trees should be prized immensely, 

 kept even in the banqueting-rooms of halls and palaces. 

 They were imported from Genoa, when four or five feet 

 high, and placed in large tubs of earth, so as to be 

 removable during summer into the open air. The taste 

 continued till the middle of the eighteenth century, or 

 till the beginning of that wonderful adornment of our 

 gardens with the best and loveliest vegetable productions 

 of foreign countries, some of the earliest to arrive being 

 the camellia and the rhododendron, soon to be followed 

 by the chrysanthemum and the fuchsia which has never 

 slackened : the orange had then to take its place with the 

 crowd, and now it is less often conspicuous than half 

 concealed. Yet the orange remains what it always was, 

 the paragon of indoor leaf, flower, and fruit-trees all in 

 one ; and charming is still the spectacle, occasionally met 

 with, of an orangery. The importation of oranges being 

 cheap and easy, there is no need to attempt to grow 



