What is an orange?

The world of citrus fruit is an incestuous one.
I had long wondered what the difference is between a mandarin, clementine, satsuma and tangerine. It turns out that the answer is: ‘bad question’; clementines, satsumas and tangerines are all varieties of mandarin. Looking a little further into the convoluted family tree of the citrus fruit reveals a pretty complicated soap opera style mess of relationships, with most of the common fruits we enjoy being hybrids of other, more unusual ones.

Citrus Venn diagram

To try and make sense of the mess I made the above ‘Citrus venn diagram’ to try and illustrate the relationships between fruit. Each circle represents a variety of citrus and those contained where others overlap signify hybrids of the two.

For example: a grapefruit is a cross between a pomelo and an orange (which is itself a cross between a pomelo and a mandarin).

It’s a rough representation, I’m not making any distinction between species and cultivars (or even a sub-genus like papeda) but at least I finally understand how mandarins, clementines, satsumas and tangerines all relate to each other. There are many more hybrids out there, but I tried to include only the more common varieties. In fact the ongoing search for a better citrus seems to be an important scientific endeavour, there is even a research centre dedicated to the exploration of citrus located, of course, in Florida.

UPDATE: You can download a higher resolution versions here.

Orange in space

(all data was sourced from Wikipedia)

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7 Comments

  1. Posted January 12, 2012 at 5:53 pm | Permalink

    What an awesome diagram! Very cleverly done.

  2. Posted January 15, 2012 at 5:56 pm | Permalink

    HA! This has entertained me greatly!!

  3. Posted January 15, 2012 at 5:56 pm | Permalink

    HA! This has entertained me greatly!!

  4. Posted January 16, 2012 at 6:02 pm | Permalink

    This is so amazing! I have been wondering about this for a while now.

  5. Posted January 17, 2012 at 2:13 am | Permalink

    So cool – love it! :)

  6. Posted January 17, 2012 at 2:38 am | Permalink

    Justin. I love this! Can I link to it on Zenspotting? :)

2 Trackbacks

  1. [...] inter-related, intimately inter-related. Buntworthy over at Cut Squash was pondering the question, what is an orange?, and decided to delve for an answer. B-worthy created the Venn diagram (above) to give us all a [...]

  2. [...] interesting look at the derivations of citrus fruits, as a Venn Diagram. #ddtbEmbedded Link What is an orange? The world of citrus fruit is an incestuous one. I had long wondered what the difference is between [...]

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