Hi Alex,
I've had a Meyer lemon tree ever since I ordered it from a comic book ad at the age of 15. It's now 61 years old! For the better part of the past decade it has lived here in Iowa in our basement under a single grow light. At the moment, it's covered in those very fragrant blossoms. I have to hand pollinate, since there are no flying insects in our basement to do the job. It takes about 9 months from pollination to ripe fruit. In the wintertime, my wife uses the lemons to make lemon meringue pie and in the summers she makes lemonade.
The tree has had numerous crises during its long life. There have been a number of attacks from scaly and wooly aphids as well as spider mites. It suffered its severest challenge in 1972 when we lived in Alabama. After I left home to go to college and then to a professional position in Huntsville, AL, my father would call us every Sunday night. In one of his phone calls in early fall, he told me that he was not bringing "that damn lemon tree" into the house one more time.
I pleaded with him to not let it perish in the Iowa cold. He relented and said he would bring it along to AL, since he and Mom were coming to visit in a few weeks. As I was helping him unload the car, I didn't see the tree. When I asked where it was, Dad pointed under the passenger seat in the car. There it (or what was left of it) was, cut down to a two-inch nub, bare-root, and in a plastic sack.
I potted it up, set it in front of our picture window, and waited. Sure enough, in several weeks I could see little green shoots sprouting from the nub. It loved the Alabama summers, and I loved that fact that it had made such a miraculous recovery.
