The Crops That Built the Coast: Florida's Forgotten Harvests
Share
For the better part of the twentieth century, the Treasure Coast was farming country — pineapple fields, citrus groves, cut flowers, mango orchards, honey. Crops that built towns and drew people from across the country and beyond, all chasing land warm enough to grow what the north couldn't. It is largely gone now. What remains are street names, old photographs, stories, and scent memories.
Pineapple — Jensen Beach
In the 1890s, Jensen Beach was the Pineapple Capital of the World. That is not a marketing claim. It was a designation earned by volume: thousands of acres of slash pine flatwoods cleared and planted with the spiky, slow-growing fruit that would define the Treasure Coast for a generation.
The pineapples went north by rail and the Indian River became a shipping corridor. Jensen Beach suddenly had a boat accessible post office, a hotel, and a future.
By 1920, it was over after a hard freeze in 1894 and another in 1895. Cuban competition also undercut Florida prices. The pineapple industry collapsed almost as fast as it had risen, and the land was replanted or returned to scrub.
What remains is the name of a street, a story, or a scent. Try ours...
Train Tracks - Pineapple Avenue — the smell of something sweet and sharp and slightly fermented, the way a pineapple smells when it's fully ripe and the sun has been on it all day, layered with cannabis sometimes grown between crops. It is a characteristic pineapple scent that carries the unintended "crops between the crops" as its defining earthy note...
Mango — The Haden Tree
In 1902, a Miami postal worker named John Haden planted a mango seedling in his Coconut Grove yard. He was not a farmer. He was not a botanist. He was a man with a yard and a tree, and what grew from it changed Florida agriculture.
The Mulgoba seedling he planted produced a fruit unlike anything else grown in Florida at that time: large, bright red-n-yellow, and sweet without the turpentine edge that made other varieties difficult to sell. Word spread. Nurserymen came to look. By the time Haden died in 1924, his tree had become the commercial standard for the Florida mango industry, and groves were being planted across the southern part of the state (we had a Haden tree on our property and family came across the state from Tampa just to collect them).
What made cultivation of the Haden possible was a widely used grafting technique. Like various other fruiting trees, mangoes don't grow delicious fruit merely from sprout, because a seed from a mango might produce something entirely different than its parent tree. That means every commercially planted mango tree was grafted with a branch from a full-sized, fruit-bearing tree, descendant (in this case, potentially) of the original Coconut Grove specimen. Perhaps that means the entire Florida mango industry traces its lineage to one backyard tree.
The industry expanded significantly since its peak. Land values made farming economically irrational in much of South Florida, and the groves gave way to development. What remain are backyard trees, farmers markets, and the Homestead Mango Festival: a celebration that almost seems proportionally larger than the crop it celebrates.
Purple Mango - Sunbeam — ripe fruit in full sun, creamy sweetness that is almost too much yet exactly right: try the smell of a mango on a July afternoon. It is a genuine Florida treat though fewer people realize it considering mangos in American grocery stores today come mostly from Mexico, available year-round at prices no Florida grower could match. The Haden variety that started it all is still out there — in backyard trees, at farmers markets, at the Homestead festival every summer, but the industry is gone.
Cut Flowers — The Fields
My great-grandfather came down from Ohio to farm. He grew chrysanthemums, gladiolus, asters, liatris, Queen Anne's Lace, and other cut-flowers for northern markets that couldn't produce anything in January. My grandfather followed in his footsteps but they were not alone. The Treasure Coast had many flower farming families, and they knew each other well: swapped stories, helped when help was needed. It was a community as well as an industry.
Flower farming ended the way many Florida industries did: not with a single event but with a perfect storm of circumstances — economics shifting all at once; air freight that made South American flowers dominant in US markets by the 1970s and 80s with Colombian roses, Ecuadorian carnations, grown at altitudes where cool temperatures extend vase life, flown to florists overnight at prices Florida couldn't match; K-Mart, Sears, and later Walmart began carrying live plants; and then grocery stores started stocking cut-flowers. The florist model that Florida growers had built their businesses around was undercut from every direction. In many cases, the fields were sold and the land found other uses.
The flower industry left behind is harder to pinpoint: maybe a street name or some people who remember it.
Potted Petals - Fred's Flowers — green stems and fresh-cut blooms, the smell of sun-warmed chrysanthemums and wildflowers: this is a floral with earthy notes. I bet farmers would approve.
Citrus — The Industry That Defined a State
No crop shaped Florida's identity more completely than citrus. The orange groves moved south over 150 years, chasing warmth after each successive freeze. They moved from North Florida in the 1800s further south to Central Florida, then to the Indian River corridor, which became synonymous with a particular quality of grapefruit: thick-skinned, sweet, and heavy with juice, worth a premium in northern markets.
Still, the freezes came. Hard ones in 1983, 1985, and 1989 that wiped out groves across Central and Southern Florida in a matter of nights. Then, citrus canker arrived: a bacterial infection spread by an invasive psyllid insect that has been dismantling what trees remained since the mid-2000s. Florida citrus production is now a fraction of its peak. Most of what is processed under the Florida label is grown elsewhere.
UF/IFAS is still working on it — but the situation is serious. Florida citrus is under active quarantine due to canker, and most fresh citrus consumed in the US now comes from countries where the disease hasn't taken hold. Whether the research leads to canker-resistant varieties that can revive commercial production, or whether the groves just keep getting sold off to developers for mini town homes, remains to be seen. Vanilla beans and olive trees have been floated as possible crop alternatives. The odds, at the moment, do not favor citrus groves; and, the farmers who haven't sold out are wary of it, even if a cure could be found.
Orange Groves - The Swamp — Florida neroli, sun-warmed citrus, and vanilla. Neroli is the essential oil of the orange blossoms. It is rare and smells like the groves did in March, not that far back when the whole state seemed to be flowering at once. That Florida fruit still exists through imported South American citrus currently uninfected by canker (Luckily, IFAS is working on it), or maybe through the scent of this candle.
Honey — The Palmetto Scrub
Florida honey is not well known outside the state, which is a shame. Saw palmetto — Florida's most abundant native nectar plant until recently — blooms across the scrub, flatwoods, and sandhill habitats of Central and South Florida; and, each May and June, it produces honey that is genuinely distinctive: amber, slightly spicy, warm in a way that reflects the landscape it comes from.
Beekeeping was never just about honey. The citrus groves, the mango orchards, the cut flower fields all depended on pollinators. The beekeepers who moved their hives seasonally through Florida's agricultural landscape were as much a part of the harvest economy as the farmers themselves, though largely invisible in the historical record. My grandparents had bee keepers on their farms in an agricultural lease agreement. I am sure many other growers did, too. There were multiple advantages as bees pollinated the nursery and were also considered livestock, and that meant farmers did not need to cultivate every inch of their land to have appropriate agriculture designation from the state: under Florida Statute 193.461
Palmetto honey is still produced and sold at Florida markets, $12 to $16 a pound. But bee colony losses are reducing domestic production at the same time consumer demand is growing (in part due to "influencers" health claims, I hear). The scrub that supports the palmetto is, itself, under development pressure, taking the gopher tortoise habitat with it. The honey exists; though, whether it continues to come from Palmetto is less certain. It seems bees are now reliant upon the invasive Brazilian Pepper...
Sun Bee - Palmetto Honey — warm sand, earth, wildflowers, and spicy honey that tasted like the saw palmetto blossom. The scrub is still out there. So are the bees, for now.
A Note on What's Coming
There is a strawberry scent in development. And with it, the story of Florida's winter strawberry harvest — the crop that grows here in December while the rest of the country is frozen — picked by hand from fields that smell like warm Florida air and ripe fruit. That story deserves its own telling, in its own season. It's coming...
Each of these scents is available as a candle, a room and linen spray, or both. They are made in Jensen Beach, Florida — on the Treasure Coast, where the pineapples used to grow.
