Lemon and orange mélange

I have on several occasions made it clear that despite the fact that I am no gardener or country dweller I have always admired and been more than a little envious of those who can turn a sod and till the soil beautifully enhancing their surroundings. For whatever reason my efforts on many occasions have failed miserably as a gardener.

My shortage of green finger technology has cruelly been obvious. I tried to grow vegetables, flowers and even trees in both England and Spain with a lack of success that was exceedingly apparent. I even proved to be useless at window box level.

However when I moved into a property in Albir I was gifted by the previous owner who obviously had planting, growing and creative talent. He had built a rockery fringed, thoroughly with a pebble dashed garden containing a mélange of scrawny citrus bushes plus a rubber tree breaking up the bareness. That my next door neighbour’s Bougainvillea had wriggled its way through my fence and added a bit of colour encouraged me to once more attempt to prettify my surroundings.

I nicked a few rotting seeds from beneath the jacaranda trees which bloomed beautifully around the tennis courts opposite the Sainvi urbanisation and uprooted some prickly wild cactus from the campo wedging ‘em between the rockery stones adding a further bit of colour. I was later to discover that some of this plant life had begun to behaved in irregular and rather weird ways giving me a smidgen of hope but not much!..

I instantly began to imagine that my garden phobias had returned to haunt me. Who else would toss into a garden scheme what appeared to be scrunched up bits of succulent wild plant life and hope they might begin to sprout, and they did, flowering in brilliant glowing yellow and developing into small crimson prickly pears. Even the Jacaranda started to show signs of life.

Cacti seemed to be my forte however at that moment. They grew quickly as well as becoming more prickly. I found that if I stuck the plate-like appendages in gritty soil they flourished, flowered and fruited. I can only assume that the elements were showing their strength.

Then came the turn of the puny pair of citrus bushes that had been abandoned by the previous owner/gardener? However, as this greenery was there before I was, I could hardly claim responsibility for what happened next, eccentric or otherwise. To mis-coin a phrase, they had gone bananas! Oranges thrived adjacent to lemons on the same branches of the same shrubs.

I don’t know if plants feel pain or sympathy but these little citrus beauties appeared to have been trying to keep up with the Jonesy neighbours. I suppose it must be daunting to be in the proximity of an expanding cactus jungle in a handkerchiefsized garden where the less than expert doesn’t know brussels from broccoli or apples from acorns. Can plants rebel, I mused when my lemon trees decided to show their mettle.

For several years the diminutive bushes have blossomed weakly and produced a handful of bitter tasting lemons. They has never borne more than halfa-dozen wrinkly fruit but the crop had been sufficient to provide peel to flavour the odd martini and offer the chance of making lemon curd!

Then, eureka, the bushes changed their character. After blossoming twice in quick succession, they increased the fruit yield by almost doubling the crop.

But there were few lemons in sight. The fruit proudly expanding their skins were mainly oranges!

When the tiny green globules began to develop, they increased in size to not much bigger than tomatoes before beginning to change colour. I put this down to the fact that the bush’s energy was probably being sapped by such a bumper display, but no! They were the wrong shape too. I was intrigued and avid to discover what was happening. Some of the fruits outgrew others and ripened faster.

They then changed colour to orange.

I picked one and peeled it. They looked like Clementines and the segments were similar too. The taste though was a real let down it was similar to a bitter Seville orange.

I realised that cross-pollination could happen but this was ridiculous!

My bushes had progressed from single fruit production to a mixture of oranges and lemons with a few lemoranges and lemontine creations for good measure. Without raising a finger or even an eyebrow my pair of citrus trees had performed something of a fruity makeover. Never the horticulturist I am seriously considering the bottling of home produced, pre-mixed marmalade! Who said “If you can’t beat ‘em…Join ‘em!”