The Groves of Winter Haven

To read *The Bitter Orange*, the masterly new novel by Central Florida native Timothy Rose, is to watch the slow, yellowing decline of a kingdom. Set in the gently rolling hills of Polk County near Winter Haven, the novel tells the story of the Vance family, who built a vast citrus dynasty in the early decades of the twentieth century only to watch it slowly rot from within as the decades progressed. Rose’s prose is lush and highly sensory, capturing the heavy, sweet scent of orange blossoms in the spring and the cold, terrifying winter nights when the family stood among their trees with smudge pots, trying to save their crop from the frost.

The central figure of the novel is Clara, the family matriarch, whose life spans the entire rise and fall of the groves. Born in a pine-shack farmhouse in 1912, Clara is a formidable, often cold character who views the sandy soil of the ridge not as a landscape to be loved, but as an adversary to be conquered. Rooted in her deep, unyielding ambition, she drives her family to expand their holdings, even as the post-war boom of suburban development begins to make the land far more valuable as subdivisions than as agricultural land. Her conflict with her children, who wish to sell the groves to a Miami developer, is written with a sharp, tragic inevitability.

The novel’s final section, which deals with the arrival of the citrus greening disease in the early 2000s, is a masterpiece of environmental literature. Rose describes the slow, quiet death of the trees—the leaves turning a pale, mottled yellow, the fruit remaining bitter and small—with a clinical, devastating precision that mirrors the physical decline of the aging Clara. *The Bitter Orange* is a magnificent, deeply felt portrait of a forgotten Florida, a book that understands that the history of the state’s interior is written in the soil, and that the soil always has the final word.