Yes, the Improved Meyer lemon has orange-yellow skin if the lemons are very ripe :-) Do you have photos of the lemon in question you can post?

Patty S.

Thanks for answering!

Those lemons have nothing to do with meyer! I have found them way out in the bush in the south of Madagascar. We have spotted 7 citrus trees, all of them loaded with orange skin. One lemon One of them is talken with tangerines next to the lemons.They must all grow from seeds because there's no one to plant them! They grow next to a river, their feet being a few yards from the water.

Here is another pic with tangerines for comparison

Meyer lemons are gaining popularity.

http://users.kymp.net/citruspages/lemons.html#meyerii

It might be Rangpur Lime. They usually have orange skin and orange flesh inside.

Here's one I found in Tajikistan:

Here is a link that might be useful: Rangpur (Wikipedia)

I agree, those look very much like Rangur limes. They are actually not limes, but sour mandarins. If you scrape the skin, you will get a very distinctive mandarin (tangerine) smell. They are very nice to cook with. I have a neighbor with a large Rangur lime tree. I couldn't figure out why this neighbor just let all these very lovely mandarins drop to the ground, so one day, on my morning walk, I picked one up that had dropped to the ground. I peeled it and bit into it. Wow. What a surprise! I came how and did a little research online and figured out that he had a Rangpur lime tree. Lovely, beautiful, but very sour fruit.

Patty S.

Thanks for the informations.
But I am still not convinced! One of the fruits I ate was sweet and the others had the taste of lemmon and not so acidic. Moreover, as said in my first post,those trees are way out in the bush, no roads reach that area wich is very wild. You can get there by foot only, in a riverbed. How could a citrus from India reach that place? A colonizer way back in time has dropped a few seeds that germinated? Maybe...

Well, sounds like you have two different cultivars, tanety. And yes, they could certainly be seedlings. Are the trees very thorny? Often a feature of seedling citrus trees. And citrus have been spread far and wide. You would be very surprised at where citrus has been over the thousands of years it has been cultivated. What an interesting find, though! I would see about trying to graft some budwood from these, so you have your own trees.

Patty S.

Hello Patty, thanks, that sounds ok to me. I have taken 10 seedlings back with me. They will be planted in my garden when they are ready. Getting to the place where those citrus grow is so hard, I don't think I'll go back there. EXcept with a helicopter! It took us 5 days of horrible roads and a lot of walking to reach the "massif makay" in Madagascar.
Have a good day. bruno

I agree with Patty that you have two different fruits if the taste is so different, unless one is very under-ripe.

Citrus has probably been in Madagascar for at least 500 years. That's plenty of time for seedlings to naturally spread. They also grow citrus commercially today.

Those would probably make a good rootstock for that region.

John

For my part I think the photo and the description of the taste make a good case for a Meyer seedling.

according to the website i linked, the Meyer was "discovered" by the Western world in the early 1900's. and no one knows exactly how it came about or how long that particular variety has been around. since Meyers are thought to be a cross between a lemon and some sort of sweet orange/mandarin the characteristics of the fruit you found being near tangerines is probably more than just a coincidence.

also, during one of the ancient Chinese dynasties, the Chinese navy at that time was the world's largest, sailing west towards Africa and east towards the Polynesian Islands and i've read there's some evidence that they actually reached parts of the America's. a possibility that some of those ancient Chinese sailors brought along different citrus to eat during their voyages is likely, as they probably suffered from scurvy like the European sailors.

I will never really know where they come from! Unless a DNA analysis is done! I have sent the pics to two botanists, one english, one french, both just said "how fantastic" but were not really interested.
I have never seen a mention of the chinese coming sailing to madagascar. The island was populated by a few boats coming from Indonesia around 500 AD and then by africans and arabs.The Meyr lemons I ate here are really yellow, just like "normal" lemons. Thank you all of you for answering me! bruno

I don't think it's Meyer Lemon because I've never seen one color-up orange in the tropics. Maybe there's a lot of variability; I don't know. In Fiji, they only become yellow when over-ripe, not orange.

The only orange-skinned tropical sour citrus I know is Rangpur. Tanety, do you have a photo of the segmented interior of the fruit?

Chinese ships visited the east coast of Africa in the early 1400's, though I don't know if they went as far south as Madagascar. They traded a lot with the Arabs too, so it's wouldn't surprise me if citrus was in Madagascar in the 1400's or 1500's.

John