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Botanical Name
Citrus × aurantium

Bitter Orange

Details

Bitter orange, also sold as Seville or sour orange, is a hybrid citrus tree, a cross of the pomelo and the wild mandarin, native to southern China and South-East Asia. By about 700 AD it had spread through India and Iran into the Islamic world, and its English and botanical names go back, by way of Arabic naranj, to the Sanskrit nagaranga. It is a small evergreen with glossy oval leaves, heart-shaped leaf-stalks bearing long thorns, and strongly scented white flowers, and it can live for six hundred years. The fruit is rougher and darker than a sweet orange, its flesh too sour to eat raw but its peel richly aromatic. The Seville orange is the classic fruit for British marmalade and the bigarade of the original duck à l'orange, and its peel flavours Belgian white beer, orange liqueurs, bitters and Scandinavian Christmas breads. The south of France, Calabria and Sicily grew it on a large scale for the neroli distilled from its blossom. It also serves as the rootstock on which sweet oranges are grown, and its hard pale wood has been turned into baseball bats in Cuba.

Caution

The fruit is AHPA safety class 1 but interaction class C: like grapefruit juice, its juice inhibits the drug-metabolising enzyme CYP3A4 and so raises blood levels of drugs it clears, with interactions confirmed for cyclosporine, felodipine, dextromethorphan and saquinavir. One Chinese medicine text cautions against the unripe fruit in pregnancy, and safety while nursing is not established. Concentrated fruit extracts standardised to synephrine are class 2d: combined with caffeine they are not advised for heavy or prolonged use, nor for people with heart irregularities, high blood pressure, insomnia or anxiety. Weight-loss supplements containing bitter orange have been linked in case reports to strokes, angina, ischaemic colitis and heart attacks.

References

#1#2#3#4#5

Correspondences

Elements
None recorded
Celestial Bodies
None recorded
Zodiac Signs
None recorded
Colours
None recorded
Deities
None recorded

Folk Names

  • Bigarade
  • Bigarade Orange
  • Bigaradier
  • Marmalade Orange
  • Seville Orange
  • Sour Orange

Categories

No categories recorded.

Substitutes

No substitutes recorded.

Forms

Flower

At Grasse the blossoms were candied in great quantities, and continental Europeans drank a tea of the dried flowers as a mild stimulant for the nerves. Distilled, they give neroli and orange flower water, which French biscuit-makers added to make their biscuits crisp.

References

#6#7

Correspondences

Colours
White

Fruit

References

#8#9

Correspondences

Colours
Orange

Oil

Two oils come from the tree: oil of bigarade from the peel, and neroli, distilled from the flowers and a chief ingredient of eau de Cologne. The peel oil flavours ice creams, sweets, drinks of every kind and medicines, an oil from the dried unripe peel goes into Curaçao liqueur, and neroli is used in perfume.

References

#10#11

Peel

The peel is the fragrant part of a fruit too sour to eat. Used fresh or dried, it is powdered as a bitter tonic, for which Grieve rated the Seville peel above the sweet. Dried and ground, it spices Scandinavian Christmas bread and gingerbread, and it flavours Belgian white beer, Cointreau, orange bitters and glögg.

Caution

Eating large amounts of orange peel has been said to cause colic and convulsions in children, but AHPA traces the one recorded death to a single case of 1833 and finds no concern at standard doses.

References

#12#13#14#15

References

Notes

  1. Gardner and McGuffin, American Herbal Products Association's, pp. 220–221, 223; pp. xxii–xxiii.
  2. Grieve, "Orange, Bitter."
  3. Grieve, "Orange, Sweet."
  4. Kynes, Witches' Encyclopedia of Magical, under "Orange".
  5. Wikipedia, under "Bitter orange."
  6. Grieve, "Orange, Sweet."
  7. Wikipedia, under "Bitter orange."
  8. Gardner and McGuffin, American Herbal Products Association's, p. 220.
  9. Wikipedia, under "Bitter orange."
  10. Grieve, "Orange, Sweet."
  11. Wikipedia, under "Bitter orange."
  12. Gardner and McGuffin, American Herbal Products Association's, p. 221.
  13. Grieve, "Orange, Sweet."
  14. Kynes, Witches' Encyclopedia of Magical, under "Orange".
  15. Wikipedia, under "Bitter orange."

Bibliography

  • Gardner, Zoë, and Michael McGuffin, eds. American Herbal Products Association's Botanical Safety Handbook. 2nd ed. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2013. (PDF.)1812
  • Grieve, M. "Orange, Bitter." A Modern Herbal. Accessed October 11, 2026. https://www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/o/orabit11.html. Open the Source2
  • Grieve, M. "Orange, Sweet." A Modern Herbal. Accessed October 11, 2026. https://www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/o/oraswe12.html. Open the Source361013
  • Kynes, Sandra. The Witches' Encyclopedia of Magical Plants: History, Folklore, Correspondences, and Spells. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2024. (EPUB.)414
  • Wikipedia, under "Bitter orange." Accessed October 11, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bitter_orange&oldid=1368703094. Open the Source5791115