The Oldest Orange Tree in France

Planted in 1421, the orange tree successively called the Grand-Connétable, François I, and finally the Grand-Bourbon, is probably the first tree of this species introduced to France. However, its legend has some obscure and questionable beginnings.

In 1421, a queen of Navarre, after eating a bigarade (a small orange with a sour and bitter taste), found such pleasure in this fruit, then rare in northern Spain, that she planted the five seeds she had from it in a pot. However, history shows that in 1421, King Charles III of Navarre, known as the Noble, had been widowed for five years by his wife Eleanor of Castile. It was only after her death, in 1425, that their daughter Blanche succeeded him.

In any case, the seeds germinated and were cultivated in Pamplona, the capital of the Kingdom of Navarre, until 1499. At that time, Catherine of Foix, great-granddaughter of Blanche and heir to the Kingdom of Navarre, sent a gift to Anne of Brittany, her first cousin, at the time of her marriage to King Louis XII—a box containing five orange trees, rare and precious objects, indicating their origin. The first orange trees then entered France.

But how did this box later become the property of the Constable of Bourbon? Tradition fails to reveal this. What is certain is that it was at Chantelle Castle in Bourbonnais when it was razed after the Constable left France to join Charles V. In the inventory of goods confiscated from the Constable, there is an orange tree with five branches from… Pamplona.

These five branches were five original plants that had fused by approach grafting.

It is at this point that the history of our tree becomes certain! Transported in 1532 to Fontainebleau, of which François I said, “that if one presented or he could recover something rare, it was for his Fontainebleau,” it took the name of its new owner.

Louis XIV, passionate about Versailles, as François I had been about Fontainebleau, had the great Italian masters who had been gathered there for a century removed to his favorite residence. The famous orange tree met the same fate, and the Orangerie of Versailles, built by Mansart, was barely completed when, in 1687, the finest orange trees from Fontainebleau were brought there, “among which,” said the Mercure galant, “was the orange tree named the Bourbon, said to be about five hundred years old.” The Mercure exaggerated the legend. Assuming the 1421 date, this tree would have been only 266 years old at that time.

Since that time, this beautiful tree, which indeed belongs to the species of bigaradiers, has been preserved in the Orangerie of Versailles. In the mid-19th century, it was not only the oldest and largest among the superb collection of orange trees at Versailles but also the most vigorous, healthiest, and most fertile.

Poiteau reports, in his Histoire naturelle des orangers, that in 1818, an immense quantity of flowers was collected from it, and the following year it bore more than a thousand fruits. Its height is 7.20 meters, including the box, and its crown has a circumference of 16.50 meters; it would have a much greater development if the porticos of the Orangerie, through which it is taken out in spring and brought back in autumn, were large enough. Its stem, extraordinarily short and triangular in shape, divides almost at ground level into three arms, two of which soon subdivide, forming a total of five large branches that rise in a spiral, forming a magnificent tree with a very particular silhouette.