lemon tree – the heart thrills

THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD IN THE GARDEN

Los Angeles, 6 April 2026

The day of the birth is coming soon! Keeping our daughter company as we wait for The Happy Event, we have been spending considerable time in the house’s backyard. It is, I’m sure, like many other backyards in this part of Los Angeles: a rectangle of lawn surrounded by various plants, some introduced by my daughter, some brought in by wind, birds, or squirrels, but the great majority, I’m sure, planted by previous occupants of the house.

In a moment of idle curiosity, I started looking more closely at all these plants. In most cases, I had no idea what they were. Luckily, though, my trusty iPhone helped me out with its plant identification app. And the picture that emerged is that the whole wide world has been brought into this little rectangle of Los Angeles earth.

The biggest contributor has been Asia, especially East Asia. The most showy of these Asian immigrants has been an Indian azalea – which, despite its name, is actually native to southern China as well as Viet Nam and Thailand. When my wife and I arrived, we were dazzled by the cloud of flowers on it.

Since that first day, flowering has peaked and the bush is looking less dramatic.

Across the lawn are a couple of camellia bushes, a plant which is native to China and Japan. They form a veritable wall.

The flowers, on one bush a deep pink and on the other bush a whitish pink, are a charming vista.

Another camellia down the house’s side alley gently rains white flowers day after day, lifting my spirits as I throw the trash out.

Hidden away behind some other bushes is an Indian hawthorn, which, again, despite its name, is native to southern China, as well as Japan and a number of countries in South-East Asia.

When in full flower, as is the case for this bush close to where we are staying, it’s quite a magnificent site.

From the bush’s position in a corner where no-one goes (except nosy parkers like myself), I suspect that it was a “gift” from another garden brought by wind, birds, or squirrels; it is a popular plant in the neighbourhood.

There is also a rose bush against the fence. Truth to tell, as this photo shows, it is a rather miserable specimen, with only one flower on it at the moment.

But its presence allows me to recount the interesting story behind garden roses. There are more than 300 species of wild roses; most of them are native to Asia, with smaller numbers hailing from Europe, North America, and Northwest Africa. Despite this global presence, it is the China rose, native to Southwest China, which has most contributed to today’s cultivated roses. For about 1,000 years, the Chinese had been breeding it into garden varieties, extensively interbreeding it as well with the giant rose, which is native to Yunnan as well as to northeast India and northern Myanmar. Then, from the 17th Century onwards, Europeans brought back a number of varieties from China and started the modern breeding programmes, which has led to the enormous range of domesticated roses that we know today.

East Asia keeps on giving, with a Chinese photinia in a corner.

As the name suggests, this plant is native to China, but also to Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and India.

Next to the Chinese photinia is the aptly-named red tip photinia.

As the photo shows, the top leaves turn bright red. When all the top leaves go red, it is a very handsome sight. This photinia is actually a hybrid, between the Chinese photinia and another photinia, the Japanese photinia, which is not only native to Japan but also to south and central China, as well as to parts of Thailand and Myanmar.

We’re not finished with East Asia yet! Tucked away close to the “Indian” azalea is a small bush of heavenly bamboo (which, confusingly, is not actually a bamboo). It is native to broad swathes of East Asia.

This particular bush is in flower at the moment.

But heavenly bamboo also grows bright red berries, as this specimen I came across in the neighbourhood shows.

Next to the heavenly bamboo is a bush of hydrangea (or hortensia, as I’ve always called it).

It’s only just beginning to bloom, but my daughter tells me that its mophead flowers are pinkish in colour. This tells me that it is almost certainly a variety of Bigleaf hydrangea, which is a native of coastal areas of Japan.

In front of the Indian hawthorn – one of several plants screening the poor hawthorn from view – stands a Japanese cheesewood. It is native to the southern half of Japan but also to China, Taiwan, and Korea.

It’s not terribly interesting at the moment, but my daughter tells me that when it flowers the scent is heavenly.

The final immigrant from East Asia is a dwarf umbrella tree. As the name suggests, it is small, pressed down by the other trees and bushes around it.

It is native to Hainan province in China and Taiwan.

Asia has still not finished giving! Two final plants from this region come from South Asia.

Planted in front of the camellia “wall” is a lemon tree, which has been the subject of a past post. It is producing a satisfactory number of lemons at the moment.

As I mentioned in another post, on citron, the citrus family hybridises like crazy. The lemon is one such hybrid, of the citron and the bitter orange. The hybridisation event probably occurred in Northeastern India during the 1st millennium BC.

The second plant in the garden to have come originally from South Asia is orange jasmine.

This species of jasmine is native to South Asia, Southeast Asia and northern Australia. The flowers smell lovely, although their density on this particular bush is quite low compared to other species of jasmine my wife and I have seen.

I don’t know if readers have been counting, but that is 12 species to have come from Asia. Africa, however, is fighting its corner as a source. It has birthed nine of the plants which have put down roots in that little rectangle of Los Angeles earth – most of them, interestingly enough, from South Africa.

Currently, the most showy of these African immigrants is the Natal lily.

It is native to the Eastern Cape, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal provinces of South Africa, as well as to Eswatini.

From more or less the same part of the world comes the myrtle-leaf milkwort. It’s not as showy as the Natal lily, but it’s still very pleasant on the eye.

It is native to the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces of South Africa.

The garden also contains an African lily, which is another native of the Kwa-Zulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces of South Africa. The specimen in the garden is currently just a jumble of rather uninteresting leaves.

But it will soon have lovely blue flowers, mopheads like the hydrangea. Here’s an example from around the corner, where the flowers are just beginning to come out.

Poking out from a crush of bushes in one corner is the carnival ochna, which also is indigenous to the KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape, and parts of the Western Cape provinces, as well as Eswatini and Lesotho. It has this small but rather lovely flower.

This flower gives rise to another, rather odd, name for the bush: Mickey Mouse bush. I report without comment the explanation I’ve read for this name: if you take the flower when the fruit is ripe (which is when those green spheres become black) and hold it upside down, those spheres resemble Micky Mouse’s head and ears, while the bright red sepals resemble his shorts.

Another plant from the KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces of South Africa (but also from Mozambique), a succulent this time, is the jade plant. It is growing in several different places in the garden This is the most handsome specimen.

I’m generally not a great fan of succulents, but I have to say, these jade plants are really quite eye-catching. This particular specimen has no flowers at the moment, but another specimen in another corner of the garden has come out with small pink and white flowers.

A final plant native to southern Africa, but also the more tropical latitudes of the continent, is the spider plant.

It does indeed have a spider-like look, of the daddy-long-legs variety. It comes out with a lovely white flower, but at the moment the specimen in the garden is flowerless.

So, many plants from southern Africa, and in particular from the Kwa-Zulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces of South Africa – there must be a biodiversity hotspot in those two provinces. But the garden also has two succulents from the Canary Islands (which I include in Africa even if they are formally part of Spain; a glance at a map will show why). These two succulents actually belong to the same family. There is a giant velvet rose (although this particular specimen is not so gigantic).

And there is a tree houseleek or Irish rose.

The final plant from Africa is the fire stick, which has a wide distribution throughout Africa as well as being present in the Arabian Peninsula.

The topmost branches of some of the specimens we have seen here really are a fiery orange, living up to their name of fire stick.

But this specimen’s colouring is rather dull.

Latin America and the Caribbean also has a strong presence in the garden, clocking in at seven plants. The most showy of these is an amaryllis.

Most of the species are concentrated in eastern Brazil and in the central southern Andes of Peru, Bolivia and Argentina, with some species being found as far north as Mexico and the West Indies.

I prefer this plant, though, with its white, mauve, and purple flowers.

The flowers start as white and then shade off to mauve and finally to purple as they age. I suppose that explains its rather strange name: yesterday, today and tomorrow, as well as a number of variations on that theme of three. It is endemic to Brazil.

Against the fence is a young queen palm.

Its original home is the area which is comprised of northern Uruguay, northern Argentina, eastern and central Paraguay, and eastern and southern Brazil. My daughter tells me that this tree just appeared one day. She suspects – correctly, I think – that its parents are the mature queen palms one can see in the background, which grace the neighbour’s backyard. No doubt one of the squirrels which scamper along the garden’s fences brought over a nut which fell from those large, hanging clusters we see on the mature trees.

Close to the queen palm my daughter planted a couple of cherry tomatoes last year. I doubted they would take, but one of them has!

While we admire my daughter’s handiwork, it is good to remind ourselves that the wild ancestor of the tomato, the currant tomato or pimp, is native to Ecuador and Peru. It was domesticated somewhere between there and Mexico, where the Spanish conquistadors saw it in the markets of Tenochtitlan and started its global travels.

Talking of plantings by my daughter, she got the gardener to plant a monstera which had outgrown its pot. After a few days, it was looking miserable and in this case, too, I thought it wouldn’t last. But it has!

I had always thought that monsteras hailed from Africa. But no. They are native to tropical regions of Central and South America. For any of my readers who, like me, are interested in the etymology of words, they might be intrigued to know that the plant’s name comes from the Latin word for “monstrous” or “abnormal”, and refers to its unusual leaves with their slits and holes.

Cheek by jowl with China’s dwarf umbrella tree is a boldo.

This small tree is endemic to the central region of Chile.

The Caribbean islands have given the garden one plant, the variegated spider-lily. Right now, it is just a mass of unruly leaves. My daughter says the plant has been growing like crazy and she plans to cut it back.

With a bit of luck, we’ll see its rather lovely white flower before we leave.

The world still keeps giving! From Europe, we have the wild privet, which is currently flowering.

Unfortunately, Europe has also given the garden ivy, which I am currently hard at work trying to eradicate. It’s been taking over a whole section of the garden and threatens to throttle all the plants in its way.

The Pacific Islands are the original home of one plant in the garden, the Hawaiian hibiscus. The cultivar planted here is a beautiful yellow.

The Hawaiian hibiscus is actually the result an ancient hybridisation event, which took place before the Europeans discovered the Pacific Islands. Fascinatingly, the hybridisation involved a hibiscus found in the islands of Vanuatu and another hibiscus which hails from the islands of French Polynesia. These two sets of islands are more than 4,000 km apart! So how did these two species of hibiscus manage to hybridise? Since the hibiscus from French Polynesia was important in Polynesian culture and medicine, it is theorised that it must have been taken across the south Pacific as one of the so-called canoe plants which Polynesians carried with them when they undertook their long-range seafaring, a topic I’ve discussed in the context of the sweet potato.

Is California the source of any of the plants in the garden? As far as I can tell, no. The only American plant in the garden, a great rhododendron, actually comes from the Appalachians, some 4,500 km away.

Right now, the bush has exactly one flower on it, although there are signs (in the form of dead flowers which have not been removed) that it will be covered in flowers at some point – if the damned ivy doesn’t throttle it beforehand.

Well, since I started this post The Happy Event has occurred! My wife and I now have a second grandson. Over the next few months, we can take him out to the garden and show him the plants and tell him that he can already begin to explore the world he entered right here in his Mum and Dad’s backyard.

LIMONCELLO

Los Angeles, 24 December 2022

One of the duties which my wife and I have as grandparents is to walk our newborn grandchild around, mostly to put him asleep but also just to keep him occupied while his mother gets herself ready to feed him. When it’s my turn, I like to take him into the back garden to admire the plants there – well, I fondly imagine that he’s looking at the plants, although in my more sober moments I recognize that he hardly distinguishes colours and shapes yet.

One of the plants in the back garden is a lemon tree – more of a lemon bush, actually, but still covered in lemons.

We pick the lemons off the bush and use them in the typical way, on fish, in sauces, in tea. But we have difficulty keeping up with the bush’s production and I’ve been thinking on and off about what other – easy – uses my daughter could put the lemons to (in principle, they could be used to make lemon tarts and what have you, but that requires far too much work). It just so happens that we’ve returned from a lightning visit to a couple who live in Seattle, old friends from the distant, distant past. As we chatted about this and that, they happened to mention that they would soon be getting a couple of bottles of home-made limoncello from a friend. A light went on in my head.

Could my daughter and her partner be making limoncello with their lemons?

For those of my readers who are not familiar with limoncello, it is a lemon-based liqueur whose origins lie somewhere in the south of Italy. Here’s some shelves with a number of different limoncello brands on them.

On the face of it, it’s quite easy to make. Drop lemon zest into pretty much pure alcohol. Let the zest steep for several weeks to make sure that the alcohol extracts all the essential oils and aromatics in the zest, by which point the alcohol will have taken on the product’s characteristic yellow hue which you see in the photo above. Add syrup, that is to say, water with a lot of sugar dissolved in it. Let the mixture stand for another couple of weeks. Strain out the zest. Bottle. Voilà! Or actually, since we are talking about an Italian product, Ecco!

Of course, it’s not really ecco!; the devil, as they say, is in the details.

Let’s start with the lemons. Since their whole purpose is to imbue the alcohol with essential oils, the sources insist on using types of lemons whose zest is packed with these oils. That’s one thing I learned in researching for this post, that there are many types of lemons. In my ignorance, I had assumed that a lemon is a lemon is a lemon. Eh no, amici miei! There are actually many types of lemons, 30 to 40 depending on the source you read. And – vital for our story – some have more essential oils in their zest than others.

Now, I have no idea what type of lemons are growing in my daughter’s garden. I just have to hope that they contain sufficient amounts of essential oils for a passable limoncello to be made from them. But if my readers are are interested and have a choice, a good lemon to use is the limone di Sorrento which, as the name suggests, originally came from the Sorrentine peninsula and now grows all around the bay of Naples (and has been exported around the world, so it is almost certainly available somewhere in California).

Somehow, the locals living on the Amalfi coast managed to get the lemon certified as having Protected Geographical Indication under the name of sfusato amalfitano; they must have enjoyed taking over the name and thumbing their collective noses at the Sorrentini! One of those wonderful stories of local rivalries in Italy, which I’ve mentioned in an earlier post.

In any event, it’s certainly true that the little towns along the Amalfi coast have been most vociferous in their claims to be the source of limoncello, although there is no solid evidence to this effect. Here, we have one of those vociferating towns.

There is a rather fanciful Creation Story doing the rounds, which involves the grandmother of the owner of a bar on the Amalfi coast. He offered his clients this wonderful lemon-based liqueur made the way his dear old grandmum used to make it, using the same lemons from the old lemon trees which grew in her lovely little garden … the rest is history! I rather cynically suspect that the Amalfi coast’s claims have something to do with the locals’ pressing need to find an outlet for all the lemons that grew there. There was a time when the various navies of Europe bought them to deal with scurvy, and the steep, rocky hillsides were turned into a tapestry of tiny lemon orchards to meet the demand.

With the bottom of that market dropping out, another outlet was needed if all these slips of lemon orchards were not to go to rack and ruin. Limoncello seems to have saved the day. I read that more than half of the Amalfi coast’s lemon crop is now used to make the liqueur. In passing, I should note, in case any of my readers are interested, that some enterprising people have organised a Sentiero dei Limoni, or Lemon Trail, which runs from the village of Maiori to the village of Minori through the lemon orchards, under the trellises over which the trees grow.

Having good lemons is a necessary but not sufficient condition for making a good limoncello. The manner in which the zest is removed is also key. The sources are most insistent on this. No pith must make its way into the brewing limoncello! It will add bitterness. One source suggests that even a vegetable peeler is too risky, a microplane should be used, and the zested lemons should look like this at the end of the process (also showing the zest and the microplane).

But that leaves a lot of wounded lemons. I’m sure my daughter could make a lemonade, or a sauce for a fish dish, but what, I wonder, do commercial producers of limoncello do with the tonnes of lemons they’ve zested? The sources are silent on this point.

Pithless lemon zest is also a necessary but not sufficient condition to make a good limoncello. There’s the alcohol into which you put the zest. As I said earlier, the sources talk about using pretty much pure alcohol, what’s called rectified spirits in the trade, with some sources strongly suggesting to use an alcohol with nothing less than 90% alcohol by volume, i.e., 90 ABV or, to use the older system, 180-proof. For me, that’s like saying that your alcohol should come from a place like this.

I would prefer to use something more natural, something distilled from fruit or grain or tubers, out of a pot still like this.

And I would like this equipment to be used by some farmer somewhere, like these French farmers, so-called “bouilleurs de cru”, who were caught in the act of making eau-de-vie by the French painter Henri-Edmond Cross in this painting of 1893 (by the way, “bouilleurs de cru” were farmers who were given a tax-free, and hereditary, privilege by Napoleon to make eau de vie, in order to boost production of strong alcohol for his troops).

A number of sources suggest using vodka (no doubt because it has little or no taste of its own, a fact well-known by those who are in need of an early-morning shot but don’t want others to smell it on their breath). But, alas, I read that a number of vodka brands are actually made by taking industrially-made ethanol and simply adding water to reduce its strength to more drinkable levels. So I suspect that going for a cheap brand of vodka to make limoncello (no point buying an expensive brand…) would not actually avoid using alcohol produced in a chemical refinery.

In any event, I think there is something fundamentally wrong in using a Polish-Russian alcohol to make an Italian liqueur. We need an Italian alcohol! Which really means using either grappa or acquavite (both made with grapes, but grappa uses the pomace generated during wine-making, while acquavite is made with grape must and pomace). Of the two, I would plump for acquavite, for two reasons. First, grappa is primarily made in the north of Italy, so that wouldn’t do for a southern Italian product – see my comment above about local rivalries in Italy. Second, I was thrilled to learn that the technique of distillation was reintroduced into Europe in the 11th Century by the doctors at the medical school in Salerno, who in turn picked up the technique from the Muslims in Andalusia. Here’s a Medieval miniature showing the good doctors at work.

What’s so wonderful about this is that Salerno is a mere hop, skip and a jump from the Amalfi coast, and those worthy doctors used the newfound distillation technique to make acquavite! Well! Even though the good doctors made their acquavite for medical purposes, that’s enough of a coincidence to make me say that acquavite has to be the go-to alcohol base for limoncello. There is a small-scale producer of limoncello on the Amalfi coast by the name of L’Alambicco who agrees with me; its owner declares that his product is made with acquavite made in-house. That being said, I’m embarrassed to say that as far as I can make out the only commercial producers of acquavite are all from the north of Italy and generally also make grappa. So, rather unwillingly, I throw in here a photo of a bottle of acquavite from one of these northern Italian producers, chosen, I have to say, more for the pleasant shape of the bottle than for the quality of its contents.

After all that, though, my daughter might have to opt for vodka. The fact is, I’m not sure she can find acquavite in LA (there’s a fancy Eataly store here, which carries grappa – at hideously high prices – but no acquavite).

So now we are at the last step in the process. Two things are happening here: sweetening and dilution. To this effect, the sources suggest using a concentrated solution of sugar in water. As far as dilution is concerned, I suppose that depends on what the ABV or proof of the original alcohol was. Anything with an ABV of around 40 (proof of around 80) probably won’t need dilution, while anything with ABVs above that, will. But that depends on whether or not one likes one’s liquor that grows hairs on one’s chest, as they say.

As for the sugar, the quantities added is a matter of taste. The couple in Seattle, for example, prefer the limoncello made by their friend because his product is less sweet than commercial brands. I would tend to agree with them, commercial limoncelli do tend to be too much on the sweet side. But hey, sweetness is on the tongue of the taster (to mangle the saying about beauty being in the eye of the beholder). As for the type of sugar to use, most people – my daughter included, I’m sure – would stretch out their hand for the cane sugar they have in their kitchen cupboard. And I understand that; why make your life more difficult than it has to be? But since I took the high road of localism with the alcohol, I feel I should point out that cane sugar actually originated in New Guinea and South-East Asia (and was then exported all around the world), so I now make a plea for using a more local source of sweetness. For instance, staying with the grape theme, one can now find grape sugar on the market. I throw in here a photo of one such product, made by an American company – but with Italian grapes! A very pleasing coda, I find, to this post dedicated to an Italian product.

Here’s a more romantic photo of this type of sugar.

Well, with that, I make a toast to all my readers, may you all have wonderful end-of-the-year festivities! cin-cin!