When Life Doesn't Give You Lemons, Would an Orchid Do?

I wrote a post in 2015 called Art's Lemon Tree Grove. We had tasted Art's sister's Meyer lemons in California when we visited her in 2013. She and my brother-in-law are avid gardeners. We could not believe how sweet the lemons were. They tasted like sweet lemon juice without any tartness at all.

Well... she sent us a lot of seeds from her tree that Art promptly planted.

We ended up with quite a few lemon seedlings that Art even shared with friends.

Oops!

The ones he kept grew and grew and grew. 

But there were no lemons.

There were just huge, dangerous thorns which I would occasionally cut off.

When we researched how to propagate trees, we learned TOO LATE that you can't get the same sort of fruit from seeds.

You have to GRAFT them from the original tree. 😖

So now we had these trees and they kept growing. I kept telling Art that he needed to get rid of them. 

But now they were like his babies and he just couldn't kill them.

Eventually, the pots started to crack and weeds joined the huge, thorny trees. He even transplanted a couple of the lemon trees into new pots until I finally told him they just had to go.

So last month... finally... after ten years and more persistent nagging discussion, he said goodbye to his overgrown ugly not pretty lemon trees after I cut the tops off. 

Yes, I did warn him that I would before I did it. The pots were so brittle from the Hawaiian sun that much of it just cracked off. There wasn't a lot of dirt left in the pot.

However...

There were these plants (weeds) that had attached itself to the lemon trees' roots.

My brother, Dennis had taken a photo of one of the flowers from the weeds a while ago.

It looked like an orchid, but could they grow in really old yukky dirt?

Dennis said it was a common wild ground orchid and that we should just discard it because you can find them growing wild all over the island.

And did he discard the ground orchid weed? Nope, just transplanted them to this pot.

And do you think he tossed ALL the non-producing rather unsightly lemon trees? Sigh... Nope.

He said he liked the bonsai like roots at the bottom of the lemon tree. And wouldn't you know that even though I'd trimmed off the top branches, there were more shoots coming up at the top and the bottom.

Ah well... I give up.