Meyer Lemon

Meyer lemon was collected near the small village of Fengtai, outside Peking, China, in the summer of 1908 by USDA plant explorer Frank Meyer, who found it growing in a courtyard pot and shipped cuttings back to California; it is generally believed to be a natural hybrid of a true lemon and a mandarin-orange relative. Meyer's own story ended tragically: just a decade after his discovery, in 1918, he vanished from a boat on the Yangtze River while on a later collecting expedition, and his death remains, in the USDA's own words, "a mystery and source of speculation" to this day. The lemon that bears his name became genuinely popular in California through the 1930s and 1940s, but it turned out to be a serious, if silent, agricultural threat: Meyer lemon trees were later discovered to be symptomless carriers of citrus tristeza virus, a disease that had already devastated millions of commercial citrus trees elsewhere before the connection was identified, and California ultimately quarantined and destroyed the original stock. In the early 1970s, University of California horticulturists identified and released a virus-free selection, the "Improved Meyer Lemon," which is the only version legally sold and the one nearly everyone grows today. Its thin, delicate skin, which does not ship or store well, has kept it largely a backyard and small-grower favorite rather than a major commercial crop, prized specifically for tolerating cold and neglect better than a true lemon while still fruiting reliably in a pot.