So…. you might remember that I mave have vented (unusual for me I know) about the lemon tree Bill ordered me for Christmas. In his usual last minute haste, Bill tok my list of suggestions and hit the computer running .He just ordered it all, no thought to ,well, really anything, and sat back and waited for it to arrive. As far as the lemon tree goes he did not even keep track of where he ordered it from, and erased any confirmation emails, lest he ruin my “surprise”.

Well, whovever shipped it apparantly failed middle school geography or something,and is entirely unaware that here in the North Eastern part of the country we have a thing called winter. We came home late one night to find a crumpled up box sitting out on the steps in o degree weather with an even more  below zero wind chill. Call me crazy, but maybe the words “live plant” on the box xould have alerted the UPS man to come back when we were home, or maybe even better the nursey could have sent us an email like so many of the good ones do, promising to ship when the shipping weather is safe.

Inside we found the tree, that’s it. No packing material, no shredded newspaper, plastic peanuts, or bubble wrap. No reciept either, or invoice, or growing instuctions.Many of the branches were just snapped off , from whatever sort of mayhem happened during shipping, and most of the leaves were already curling and blackening from being frozen. The leaves that were still attached, and not yet curled, promptly did so and fell off immediatly after. Merry  #$%&*^%  christmas Cheryl  😉

So, I had a tantrum to Bill and demanded he get a refund and or replacement,I  even snapped photos for him to use in his argument with the nursey,  only to find out he had no way to  return it. Just in case you think I am coming down hard on my man, I will tell you this is not an isolated incident . I will  just say “the Tom-Tom birthday fiasco’, and leave it at that.

Usually in these cases he takes the offending gift and stores it in his car for a while, and then when he tires of it I think he lets it out the window on the highway while he is traveling to work. I jest not, he has NEVER returned anything. In preparation for the long car ride to lemon tree heaven, he placed the tree in our unheated garage where it sat for three weeks throughout the christmas holiday.

Sometime after New Year’s Day , I went out to the garage, and in a random act of misplaced concern kindness carried the tree into the kitchen. It sat all dead-like right next to my desk for a while, mostly just to make Bill mad.

At this point the tree had zero leaves, just a sad stick in a too small plastic pot of some kind of planting m edium that despite my best efforts refused to hold any water whatsoever. After mopping the water up for the kagillionth , I headed to home depot, and bought some potting soil and a new pot. Why I even though for one minute the tree would rebound is beyond me. Call it intuition, call it hope, call it  a desperate attempt to salvage the $100, but guess what?

It still has a long road to recovery, I will have to prune it , and probably establish a new leader, but if it can just hang on until spring when it will get plenty of  sun and attention outside I have high hopes for it.   As a gardener failure is just part of the learning process and I certainly have killed and or maimed my share of plants….but maybe, just maybe, I saved this one 🙂