Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Afourer Mandarin and the Sordid Sexual Escapades of Citrus




W. Murcott Afourer
Citrus reticulata Blanco

wmurcott


   Recently I purchased some incredible Afourer Mandarin marmalade from June Taylor. I was intrigued by this variety I had never heard of that was so delicious and I decided to do some sleuthing. 
    It seems that there is much confusion around mandarin/clementine varieties especially due to trademarking for marketing purposes.  Names have been changed and varieties are easily confused with each other.  Afourer, for example, is known as W. Murcott.  This is different from Murcott, aka Murcott Honey or Honey tangerine.  Afourer has also been trademarked by Tom Mullholland, one of the larger citrus growers in California, as Delite.  It is a tangor variety, a mandarin and sweet orange hybrid, brought to California from Morocco in 1985. It is believed to be a hybrid of Murcott and an unknown pollen parent. One of the oldest known tangors is Royal mandarin or Temple orange which was discovered growing wild in Jamaica in the late 1800's.  
    Afourer was not released to California nurseries until January 1993 and it is now planted extensively in the San Joaquin Valley.  It is an alternate bearing variety, meaning that it will produce a heavy crop every other year if not pruned back, potentially exhausting the tree.  It is also one of the few citrus varieties susceptible to cross pollination from other citrus trees making the otherwise seedless fruit bear seeds.  The trees need to be isolated in some way to prevent this. This has been a problem in recent years and farmers have tried to keep bees further away from their orchards so as not to lose the value of the fruit remaining seedless.  
    One of the most fascinating things about mandarins is their role as citrus parent.  In the 1970's research results suggested that there are only three primordial or fundamental citrus species in the subgenus: C. medic (citron), C. reticulate (mandarin), and C. maxima (pummelo).  This means that all other species of citrus arose from single or sequential crossing events, which produced hybrids between the three species or their offspring.*  Although one might think that lemons, limes, oranges, and grapefruits were the parents of modern citrus plants that is apparently not the case.  They were created by an orgy of large numbers of genes and came out of the sexual hybridization of the three primordial types and kumquats and papedas.  It has taken only small genetic changes over thousands of years, assisted by man and nature, to create the plethora of varieties that exist today; all of them originating from the crossing of three original types.

 

*Taken from College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences, UC Riverside