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Driving west Friday morning on Riverside’s Arlington Avenue, I see the two-story boxy shape, a peak at the top, from a block away.
Momentarily I think it’s a church. Then I recognize what I’m seeing. It’s not a church, but in a sense it’s still holy ground.
California’s citrus industry started with two young trees, formally Washington navel oranges, shipped to Riverside in 1873 by an agriculture official in Washington, D.C., as an experiment to see if the trees from Brazil would grow here. Did they ever.
“Between the late 1800s and the early 1900s,” notes the book “Creating an Orange Utopia,” “the navel orange groves spread across Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, Los Angeles and Ventura counties, and into California’s fertile Central Valley.”
Of the two original trees, one died at age 50 of disease, despite efforts to save it. The tree at Arlington and Magnolia avenues, miraculously, survives.
Inside the sheer white screen, draped over a two-story metal frame, that tree stands. It’s called the parent navel orange. It’s more than 150 years old.
And today is harvest time.
For me, the moment is especially sweet.
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Marco Delgado hand-picks this year’s harvest from an 1873 parent navel orange tree in Riverside on Friday, Dec. 5, 2025. (Photo by Anjali Sharif-Paul, The Sun/SCNG)
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Marco Delgado hand-picks this year’s harvest from an 1873 parent navel orange tree in Riverside on Friday, Dec. 5, 2025. (Photo by Anjali Sharif-Paul, The Sun/SCNG)
I’d made a pilgrimage to the tree in early 2021 but couldn’t arrange to get inside until after the harvest. I’ve thought of the harvest every year since, but always a few weeks late. When I inquired last Tuesday, the answer was that the harvest would take place in three days.
So here I am at 8 a.m. Friday, ready to cross Riverside’s OG oranges off my bucket list — while the oranges themselves are placed in plastic buckets and bags.
Outside the structure, I don a protective white mesh jacket and fasten the snaps. Slipping blue plastic booties over my size 11 1/2 shoes from a standing position, though, is another matter.
Sohrab Bodaghi, the UC Riverside associate research scientist who met me there, kindly crouches to help me slip the booties on. If the microbiology field ever dries up, Florsheim Shoes is ready for him. He does the same for photographer Anjali Sharif-Paul.
We three enter the structure through an outer door and an inner door. All this is designed to ward off any possible contamination.
Inside, the massive tree occupies almost the entire interior: 22 feet from ground to ceiling, 25 feet in length, 25 feet in width. It’s like a sofa that takes up 80% of a room.
Two landscapers are at work, likewise clad in protective gear. Anjali and I maneuver around the edges, and under and around the branches — and, in my case, into them with my skull — to watch Alex Benitez and Marco Delgado pick oranges.
Their employer, RPW Services, has the contract with City Hall for the harvest. RPW is based in — how appropriate — the city of Orange.
The tree is on city property. City parks employees water the tree and perform basic care. UC Riverside’s renowned citrus experts do the more technical stuff like pruning, testing for pathogens, monitoring temperatures and establishing protocol.
Benitez and Delgado have been instructed not to use clippers. They will twist or pull the fruit off.
“This is my first experience doing this. It’s relaxing,” Benitez says with a laugh.
That wouldn’t be the case in the groves. Commercial growers prize speed. This, though, is no routine harvest. Or a routine tree.
Eliza Tibbets got this tree and a second (some accounts say there was a third, which died before producing fruit) from a friend in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She and her husband, Luther, had no experience with orange trees.
It’s believed that immigrant gardeners offered crucial advice on watering and pruning that made the difference.
Idealists, Eliza and Luther didn’t try to profit from the trees and often gave buds away for free, according to “Creating an Orange Utopia,” a 2011 history co-written by Patricia Ortlieb, Eliza’s great-great-granddaughter.
At their deaths, the couple’s homestead was sold and their house torn down. The two parent navel orange trees were claimed and relocated.
One was transplanted at the Mission Inn on May 8, 1903 by President Theodore Roosevelt, no less. The other was placed at Arlington and Magnolia in a tiny, fenced park on April 23, 1902.
Root rot attacked both. The hotel’s tree died in 1922. The Citrus Experiment Station managed to save the city’s tree by grafting new roots onto it — not once but twice, in the 1920s and again in the 1950s. The citrus station is now part of UC Riverside.
“Overall, the tree is doing fantastic,” Georgios Vidalakis, director of the university’s citrus protection program, told me by phone the day before my visit. But the tree is always in danger, such as from the greening disease carried by an insect known as the psyllid.
That’s why the enclosure with its ghostly screen was built in 2019.
“We’re not hiding the tree. We’re saving the tree,” Vidalakis said. “The alternative is that we are the generation that lost the tree.”
Back to the harvest. The tree is laden with fruit, all the way down to knee level.
After getting the literal low-hanging fruit, Delgado climbs a ladder and hands fruit down to Benitez. Soon, Delgado is back on the ground and using a grabber with a telescoping pole to get the fruit high overhead.
These two latter-day naranjeros are learning fast.
How many oranges are there?
“About 2,000,” Benitez estimates. Bodaghi of UCR does a rough count and confirms it.
“You might want to take some,” Bodaghi advises Anjali and me. “These are very rare. This is the original original!”
Anjali takes one. I take two. But we’re not claiming anything the public won’t have a chance to get.
By the end of this week, the city’s Parks, Recreation and Community Services Department will distribute crates of the oranges to community centers, senior centers, the third floor of City Hall and the Parks Department’s Marcy Library office.
“If anyone wants to enjoy an orange, they’re welcome to do so,” Anthony Zamora, the department’s deputy director, tells me by phone Friday.
In its third year, the distribution is growing in size and ambition. Old-fashioned crates will boast faux vintage labels, an effort led by Vanessa Mayne, a parks administrative analyst.
Reports Zamora: “I just got off the phone with Vanessa and she was saying, ‘Oh my gosh, there are a lot of oranges! They’re so heavy!’”
Heavy in weight, and heavy in meaning.
Orange you glad David Allen writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday? Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, and follow davidallencolumnist on Facebook or Instagram, @davidallen909 on X or @davidallen909.bsky.social on Bluesky.
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