Walking around Kroger today, I took a minute to realize just how cool it is that I can buy mangos in February. Not to mention oranges, limes, lemons, bananas, and peaches. It got me to thinking that, before supermarkets, people were pretty limited in their choices of fresh fruits and veggies. If something wasn't in season, you were pretty much out of luck. If something couldn't be grown in your climate, you would probably never taste it.

Unless, of course, you were rich. The rich could afford to build hothouses, in which all manner of warm-weather fruit, vegetables, and flowers could be grown in all seasons.

General Tilney, of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, is rich enough to afford this luxury. Catherine Morland describes the hothouses at Northanger Abbey as "a village." Take the following quote:

"Though careless enough in most manners of eating, he loved good fruit - or if he did not, his friends and children did. There were great vexations, however, attending a garden such as his. The utmost care could not always secure the most valuable fruits. The pinery had yielded only one hundred in the last year."

"Mr. Loudon's Improved Pinery", 1810

A pinery was a structure devoted entirely to growing pineapples, which were quite fashionable in the period. Philip Miller (The Gardener’s Dictionary, 1759) has four and a half pages (in tiny, cramped print) worth of information on the cultivation of pineapples alone. According to Miller, the pineapple  “is justly esteemed for the Richness of its Flavour, as it surpasses all the known Fruits in the World.” He proceeds to lay out very detailed instructions on how to cultivate pineapple. One instruction states that the soil should be mixed with “the Dung of an old Melon or Cucumber Bed.” The soil mixture must sit for eight whole months, “that their Parts may be better united.” It also must be turned frequently and sifted to separate out all the sand, which, according to Miller, “is very injurious to these Plants.”

This makes me truly pity General Tilney’s poor gardeners! On top of all this work, I’m sure they had the old man fussing up and down at them for only producing one hundred pineapples last year. I’m impressed they managed ten!
Yet pineapples were not the only non-native fruit the English grew in hothouses. According to Walter Nicol's The Gardener's Kalendar, berries, grapes, peaches, plums, figs, melons, oranges, cherries, apricots, asparagus and strawberries (just to name a few), were all commonly grown in the hothouses of the rich.

If I had to be a gardener in the winter, I would definitely want to be on hothouse duty!

So what did those rich folks make out of their exotic fruit stores? How about a nice pineapple ice? Perhaps some fresh apricot biscuits? And I'm sure some delicious cherry wine would not go amiss.