Citrus - Lemon Lisbon Citrus limon

Lisbon is grown as a lemon, and the citrus page carries the Missouri Plant Finder's culture for the species: sun, shelter from wind, fertile well-drained soil, water and small feeds of nitrogen through the growing season, very little pruning. That American reference reports mealybugs, red spiders and scale as the lemon's problems.

Everything specific to Lisbon is one comparison, on the Riverside collection's Eureka page, a Californian reference. Its notes say Eureka is slightly less cold-hardy and less thorny than Lisbon, which makes Lisbon the thornier and slightly hardier tree. The 1967 description it quotes calls Eureka sparsely foliated beside Lisbon, and its leaves darker, less sharply pointed and somewhat more scalloped at the edge than Lisbon's. No reference read describes Lisbon on its own: there is no size, no vigour, no cropping season and no frost figure for it, and no Australian reference was read, so this page has no climate zones either. The Atlas holds a name entry for the lemon with no state records or status text, so the status of exotic rests on the lemon's Asian native range by the Plant Finder. The size in the facts above is the Plant Finder's for the lemon species.

The Missouri Plant Finder's suggested use for the lemon species is fruit, and it lists the tree as an accent or specimen, for large containers, and as a seasonal bloomer; no reference read gives a use for Lisbon in particular. The description the Riverside collection quotes says that in California Eureka came to rival Lisbon through bearing early, thornlessness and cropping through the year, and that both remained the principal varieties there; that is the nearest the saved texts come to saying how the two are chosen. Eureka has its own page with the collection's full description, and so does Meyer. The HortOS community garden cost guide lists Eureka and Meyer among its plants, not Lisbon, and no reference read gives a planting distance.

The table above shows the sizes growers list. No saved text says how Lisbon is propagated, what size it reaches in an Australian garden or when it crops here, so those are questions for the grower. For what a sound plant looks like, roots first, see the HortOS guide to judging nursery plant quality. Stock that crosses a state border moves under the state and territory biosecurity rules; the HortOS guide to buying from a wholesale grower says nursery stock moving interstate may need a plant health certificate. The drawback the sources give is thorns: by the collection's comparison Lisbon is the thornier of the two, and the Plant Finder says the true lemon tree usually has sharp thorns on the twigs.