In 1873, a woman named Eliza Tibbitts received a plant that would change morning breakfast

tables forever.

Eliza and her husband Luther had moved to California from Washington, D.C.

In back east, Eliza was an activist and a suffragette.

She marched with Frederick Douglass to the Capitol to demand the right to vote.

In California, she and her husband were one of the first residents of a new farming community

in Riverside.

Eliza was also interested in her backyard garden, and she wanted a plant that would thrive

in this new, warm, subtropical weather of her adopted California home.

So she wrote a friend, a friend who happened to work at the Department of Agriculture, and

she asked that friend for something to grow.

He sent her three buds from a species of an orange tree from Brazil.

As the story goes, she planted the trees outside of her kitchen, she watered them with old

dishwater, one was trampled by a cow, but the other two, they thrived.

And her trees grew into the variety, we now call the Washington Naval Orange.

Eliza's trees kicked off an orange fever, what was called the second gold rush in California.

Oranges were featured at local fairs, a county was named after the fruit, you might have heard

of it, and growers went wild over the trees.

Oranges became big business in the state.

Today Citrus goes well beyond the naval orange, there are thousands of varieties and types,

and there is one place at the University of California Riverside, that has almost all

of them.

...