THE LEMON IS BASICALLY A FAMILY SCANDAL
The lemon family tree is considerably less simple than it looks.
You look at a lemon and think:
lemon.
Simple.
Not remotely.
The familiar lemon has a complicated hybrid ancestry involving citron and sour orange. Sour orange itself carries ancestry from mandarin and pummelo.
So the lemon family tree looks slightly less like a tree and rather more like several people saying:
“This is getting complicated.”
Oranges, mandarins, lemons, pummelos and their relatives have been mixing genetic histories for a very long time.
So the next time somebody refers to something as “just a lemon”, you may correct them.
It isn’t simple.
It has a past.