A lush environment, loquats, mulberries, urban change

**Photo of loquat fruit by DeusXFlorida, Flickr Creative Commons.

I haven’t mentioned it outright, but some of you may have noticed that this blog's focus has shifted away from the Northwest. That’s because I’ve relocated to Houston. I grew up here, but I’ve lived away for more than 10 years, in New York/New Jersey, Chicago, and Seattle.

Perhaps more surprising, I’m excited to be back.

Houston is a strange and interesting, multicultural place. I like the sunny, garden-like feel of my daily walks. While the city has room for improvement, I’m thrilled by the work we are doing toward sustainability and change.

**Photo of a bike against flag mural, by Adam Baker, Flickr Creative Commons.

These are exciting times for American cities. I base that on a $500 million plan to increase transit and trees in one Houston corridor; and an award recently granted to a similarly sprawling, sun-belt city, Phoenix, to improve walkability along its light-rail corridors. If you want more updates, look here.

Back to gardens, I’ve recently compared greenery with a Los Angeles friend (who also moved there from Seattle). As it turns out, we share many of the same plants. Houston, like LA, is within a few hours of the Mexican border, and has the warmth of a lower latitude.

Everything around smells like jasmine, says my LA friend. I have to say, excitedly: This is true for me, too.

On my walks, I see star jasmine, vivid and RCA-trumpet-like hibiscus flowers, and red, fuchsia, and white sprays of bougainvillea that cascade over fences.

**Photo of bougainvillea, by jchatoff, Flickr Creative Commons.

There's also plenty of citrus. Most walks pass trees hung with the small, egg-shaped orange kumquats – those lovely pellets of Vitamin C -- and orange and yellow, plum-like fruit on the long-leaved loquat trees. The latter are called nospero in Spanish.

My mom recently asked what fruits I use in smoothies. Back in Seattle, each summer I gathered blueberries, and the blackberries that thrive on invasive vines in all the Northwest's untended spaces. My mom sighed, saying she wished more fruit grew here in Houston.

It's a common complaint. Houston's often called a concrete jungle, although anyone who has spent time in more densely populated cities probably wouldn't agree.  

These days, I can see that although Houston isn't a place of mountains or dramatic landscape, the city's near-downtown areas have the lushness of the Louisiana lowlands. Plants grow, vines twist, frogs sing at night in curb-side puddles. While some parts of town, such as the mall-centered Galleria, have expanded too heedlessly -- and it's still important that we continue to put forward initiatives for parks and green spaces -- my perspective on the city has changed.

These days, I feel that edible things *do* grow everywhere here. We just have to learn how to see them. At the moment, I'm excited about several plants. The first is loquats, from which we can make preserves, chutneys, garnishes for meats.

**Photo of loquats in a bowl, by Infrogmation, Flickr Creative Commons.

Second is jasmine, whose vines and starry white flowers form most hedge-rows here. From its heady flowers, we can make infusions for cocktails and to top ice creams.

**Photo of star jasmine is by Herry Lawford, Flickr Creative Commons.

Third is mulberries, which are turning dark purple-black on their shade-providing trees. These are strange fruit, like blackberries in a worm shape, with their distinctly mulberry, slightly bland flavor. But they grow so plentifully, and in such pleasant spots alongside bayous, that I have to like them. From them, we can make sorbets, jams, pies, and many other things.

**Photo of mulberries by BionicTeaching, Flickr Creative Commons.

That's just the beginning, though. Much else will grow, as summer comes (and stays) upon the land.

**Photo at Menil Collection, Houston, by kimbo_swift, Flickr Creative Commons. ##

Thin-skinned lemons

Photo of Persian lemons (sometimes called sweet limes or sweet lemons) at the La Cienega farmers' market, in Los Angeles, by Chotda, Flickr Creative Commons.
***
Addendum:

The lemons from Clear Lake, it turns out, were likely Ujukitsu lemons. They were and are wonderful, and I’ll be back soon with more information on citrus in unexpected places.

Here's the thing: With more than 70 varieties of citrus grown in Houston these days, and nearly 200 grown by one gardener 50 miles southwest of here, things in the tart and sweet scenario have grown confusing, to say the least.

Here's my piece on Houston Press's food blog, Eating Our Words, about my mistake in citrus ID-ing.

(Next, here's what I wrote, *before* doing the research for the Houston Press piece:)

When life gives you lemons in your very own yard, pick them gleefully. That is, do so if they’re Persian lemons. 

These lemons are a recent discovery for me.  Until this week, they were just the curiously round, thin-skinned yellow fruit that I picked from a friend’s back-yard. 

The yard ran down to a canal from Clear Lake, an arm of Texas’ Galveston Bay. It’s an area near NASA, so maybe space-age citrus was in order. Still, these lemons turned out to be ancient fruit. 

Like, Gardens-of-Babylon-age fruit. Or, at the very least, they’ve been popular in Iran and the Middle East for a long time, and people eat them at the first sign of a cold. 

We brought those decidedly lumpish fruits inside, thinking that they resembled ungrown grapefruit more than lemons. My pal sliced them in half, juiced them as we watched raptly, and handed me a glass an inch or so full of the opaque yellow juice. 

I looked dubiously, noticing that no sharp, lemon-fresh scent rose from the glass. What was this?
 

Cautiously, I allowed my lips to meet the juice and drank. Wha-at? The juice from these lemons was that strangest of all considerations: sweet. 

The juice was foamy, frothy, soft to the mouth. Its citrus flavor was delicate, like the kindest of grapefruit. 

We’d established that this was not a Meyer lemon – the yard had Meyers as well, on a different tree, which we had left alone.  I haven’t been a fan of Meyers from the store, although I’ve yet to have one fresh.  

I’m saying, though, that these lumpy lemons were different. 

At my pal’s urging, we each happily filled a carrier bag with the charmingly misshapen citrus, carrying them home like pleasing treasure. 

I waited a couple of days to juice one or two more. In the meantime, the thin-skinned darlings lay in a crisper drawer on their sides. 

A few times, I pulled open the drawer just to look at them. I waited, because I didn't want to sully them with the wrong approach. 

Then, I juiced. I filled the bottom of a glass once more with the opaque liquid. I tasted.

Would the lemons taste the same, away from the citrus trees along the leafy edge of the canal? 

Their flavor was…exactly the same. Even in my kitchen, they had the same beautiful and surprising mouth-feel.
 

But what were these lemons?

They remained a wonderful mystery. My mother, who works at a natural food grocery, insisted they were Meyers. 

I felt strongly that they weren’t, because I liked them so much better. 

A few days later, I found Chowhound discussing the topic, followed by a link to a blog with the LA Times.

Persian lemons.

They could be grown from seeds, the blog said. An Iranian-American kid in LA had grown some in a back-yard, from a seed from a local Mediterranean grocery. 

Kazow. 

New lemon enthusiasm!

{p.s. Since then, I also ran across this cool So-Cal blog that also mentions Persian lemons.}