Satsuma Mandarin

Satsuma mandarins have been cultivated in Japan for centuries, first reported there more than 700 years ago and traditionally centered on the Satsuma Province (present-day Kagoshima Prefecture) on the southern island of Kyushu, from which they take their Western name — the domain's ruling Shimazu clan actively promoted citrus cultivation there. The variety reached the United States in the 1870s, most accounts crediting the wife of General Robert Van Valkenburg, the US Minister to Japan, with sending trees to family on the Gulf Coast around 1876-1878, where the region's climate proved remarkably similar to Satsuma's own. Between 1908 and 1911, roughly a million Owari satsuma trees were imported from Japan and planted across the lower Gulf Coast states, sparking what locals at the time called "Satsuma Madness" and giving rise to entire towns named Satsuma in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. Severe freezes through the 1920s and 30s, worsened by earlier clear-cutting of the longleaf pine forests that had once buffered the region from cold northern winds, steadily damaged the industry, and a hard freeze in 1940 effectively wiped out Gulf Coast satsuma production for the next fifty years. Satsuma remains, even so, the backbone of home citrus growing throughout Alabama, Louisiana, and the Florida Panhandle today, valued above all for being the most cold-hardy commercially significant citrus in existence.