The language of fruit : literature and horticulture in the long eighteenth century In The Language of Fruit Liz Bellamy explores how poets playwrights and novelists from the Restoration to the Romantic era represented fruit and fruit trees in a period that saw significant changes in cultivation techniques the expansion of the range of available fruit varieties and the transformation of the mechanisms for their exchange and distribution. Although her principal concern is with the representation of fruit within literary texts and genres she nevertheless grounds her analysis in the consideration of what actually happened in the gardens and orchards of the past.