Amateur gardeners are used to going to a nursery and choosing plant varieties by checking the label on the plant. The labels may be missing but they are seldom just plain wrong… except on fruit trees. There are several reasons for this. First, the tree doesn’t generally produce fruit until you have had it planted in your yard for a few years. The cost and size of trees already producing fruit can be very high, so people plant smaller, less mature trees, which incidentally have not yet fruited. Secondly, the fruit tree is often produced by grafting the desired variety onto a more sturdy plant. The fruit of the rootstock may bear only a passing resemblance to the fruit of the graft. If the graft dies, the only fruit produced will be from the more primitive rootstock. Unfortunately, by the time the fruit is tasted, he tree may be large and hard to consider discarding, as it may be fulfilling its other intended functions very well, such as providing desired shade and color to the surroundings.

I have not a great deal of experience in planting trees, because in general I have been looking for sun to grow vegetables and flowers. Over the years, I have planted probably a dozen trees, about half of them palm trees around a house and its swimming pool in Arizona. These fared beautifully, though I didn’t get to stay around to enjoy their maturity.

Palm trees, unfortunately, don’t have branches to support tire swings, so we had to supplement the backyard plantings at our house in Arizona with an elaborate wooden structure with two swings for my daughters’ enjoyment and exercise. When we moved to California, we took the swing set with us, because the girls spent much of their time outside climbing on the structure, swinging on the swings, and making forts from the structure’s ends. The structure was so large and so elaborate—and the back yards of homes we could afford in Silicon Valley were so small—that we chose the house we bought because it had enough back yard to fit the swing set…barely. It sat proudly in the area of the back yard planted in dichondra, squeezed between the oleander hedge at the back of the property and the cement walkway along the back of the house.

One evening soon after we moved to California, I went outside and found my daughters, aged two and four years, playing a game that involved guiding their swings back into the oleander hedge so they could catch its leaves in their mouths. I was horrified! Oleanders are commonly planted in Arizona, since they withstand the heat well, and the newspaper often featured stories about people who were poisoned by ingesting small amounts of these plants. Right before we moved there was a story in the paper about some boy scouts who became sick while camping when they used oleander branches for skewering some hotdogs to cook over their campfire.
The girls loved their new game and would clearly go back to playing it at the first unsupervised opportunity. If I wanted my children to survive their childhood, the flowered hedge would have to go.

The very next morning I ripped out the oleanders and replaced them with plants that partially satisfied my homesickness for the fruit trees commonly planted in Arizona--three dwarf citrus trees and a nectarine. The citrus trees were a Bearss lime, a navel orange, and a grapefruit. Because my neighbor had a wonderful white-fleshed nectarine, I went and painstakingly selected a nectarine labeled as white-fleshed at the garden supply store. I also planted a Eureka lemon in a pot. This plant didn’t set fruit of any quantity for ten years or more.

Soon after I planted my new trees, the Mediterranean fruit fly invaded our community. Consequently, the state’s agriculture department required us to strip all our fruit trees for the next three years to deprive the fruit flies of a place to lay their eggs, thus supplementing the malathion spraying with diminished opportunity for any surviving fruit flies to reproduce. During that time, all the trees grew to near mature height. The fourth year brought us permission to let all the fruit ripen; I was finally allowed to assess the results of my tree planting.

I learned:
1. Being homesick for grapefruit trees won’t make the fruit taste sweet in northern California. They just need more sun than they get at this latitude.
2. “Degree days” determine the sweetness of navel oranges in northern California, so some years they are sweet and other years they are quite sour, even bitter. It just depends on how warm the weather is in any given year.
3. A healthy miniature Bearss lime has a beautiful compact shape and produces about three hundred limes a year.
4. No one—except possibly a bartender--knows what to do with three hundred limes a year.
5. My supposedly white-fleshed nectarine unexpectedly produced wonderful yellow-fleshed fruit, much sweeter and far superior in taste to that of my neighbor’s tree. We enjoyed the nectarines very much for several years until the squirrels discovered them. (Squirrels will eat nectarines when they are much less ripe than people consider edible.) After that, it was a running battle with the squirrels. And I did not win the battle!
6. It is a wonderful luxury to have fresh lemons, limes, and oranges available to pick off a tree whenever you desire them.

When I moved again years later, I missed my handy citrus trees so I again purchased three dwarf citrus, which my daughter graciously potted for me---a Bearss lime, a Meyer lemon (cross between orange and lemon) and a Eureka lemon (the variety most often found in stores.) Two years later I moved the trees in their pots to a new house I bought, putting them where the sun hit them best, in the side yard next to the alley.

The first crop of Meyer lemons at my new house was stolen, so I relocated the trees to the back yard—away from the alley--and planted them in the ground there. The Eureka lemon is not happy because my dog likes to dig it up and it frequently has its roots uncovered. It is tall and has handsome foliage, but it produces only two or three lemons a year. The Meyer lemon is OK, but growing slowly, with small fruit. There were enough fruits on it this year to make a large container of lemonade and to season my fish dinners for the whole growing season.

I thought the Bearss lime seemed rather leggy but it fruited just beautifully--to my surprise, though, its fruit are definitely not limes. They look a lot like Eureka lemons, without the knob at the end of the fruit, but they are not yellow enough inside or outside to be Eureka’s. Also, unlike many modern citrus trees, this tree drops its fruit when they are ripe. (Many modern varieties store the fruit on the tree until it is picked, with the rind merely growing thicker as it stays on the tree.) The consequence of its dropping its fruit is that we have to consume the fruit on the tree’s schedule, not on ours. It’s feast or famine. So, I don’t know what variety or even what kind of fruit I planted. It’s certainly not a lime. Maybe it’s the rootstock, who knows. But it is delicious. Great on vegetables and fish and in “fruit-ade.” It does have one characteristic in common with the Bearss lime I planted twenty-five years ago—-it has produced about three hundred fruits this year. Now, if I only knew what they were, I might be able to find a bartender to buy some of them.

To contact Joan email her at jtevans2b@msn.com