Orange Lemons - or Lemon Oranges?

Growing up, as I did, in Ohio, I never dreamed I'd have the luxury of owning citrus trees. But here they are popular and pretty easy to grow! Excited about the prospect of having lemons, limes and so on, we planted a number of trees on the slope below our house. Some of the area is a bit shaded, but friends and neighbors in the area assure us that you can still get fruit as long as the tree gets some sun. So we planted a grapefruit, a couple of varieties of orange, a mandarin orange, and a lemon tree.

The orange trees were quickly devoured by the wallabies, and the grapefruit was pretty well stripped down, although it did survive (it never fruited, however, possibly because it had a tad too much shade). The mandarin is going strong, but has been without any fruit at all. The lemon - a Meyer lemon tree was following the example of the mandarin until last year. Then suddenly it got fruit!

Well - last summer wasn't the easiest one for us here (hot, dry, lots of scary fire weather days) and because I don't frequently go down to where the lemon tree is, well, I just forgot about it. But I remembered it this spring and went down to have a look.

Wow - was it ever loaded with fruit! Most of the lemons (many of which are still ripening) are quite small - but there were a handful that were larger than I expect lemons to be... and they were ORANGE!

Here's a photo of one of two pieces of fruit picked on the same day from the same tree:

What's up with that?!?!?

A little web-based research got me the answer.

Meyer lemon trees, it seems, are orange tree trunks with lemon branches grafted on. Well, whaddya know? And if you leave the fruit on too long, it turns orange and the flavour changes, too. I sliced open one of the orange ones (below) to see what it looked like, and sure enough - about halfway between the colour of a lemon and an orange:

I tasted it - and yup, orangy lemon. I'm not sure about the taste - but maybe I'll develop a fondness for it.