Media: PORT magazine
Title: Oranges and Lemons
Author: George Upton
Photography: Suzie Howell
Date: June 6, 2018
Vicente Todolí, ex-director of the Tate Modern, reflects on his passion for citrus fruit
My grandfather was a farmer who specialised in citrus. Together with my father, he developed new ways of pruning his trees and built a nursery near Valencia, selling cuttings to local farmers. When, in 1985, I returned from studying in New York, I fell back in love with the culture and landscape where I grew up and bought a piece of land next to my father’s, to start a small citrus collection.
Some years later I happened to visit a nursery in the south of France that grew an amazing variety of citrus but kept the trees in pots so they could be brought indoors between October and March. I thought about how, in Valencia, we have one of the best regions in the world to grow these plants (when the Arabs were here in the Middle Ages they referred to their citrus orchards as paradise on Earth), but we had no place to grow and celebrate the diversity of the fruit. So, in 2010, I expanded my father’s and my land and started a foundation.
