The Land Where Lemons Grow

SOMETIMES a song stays in the heart rather than the ear and for no apparent reason at all. Which is why the title of this pleasing book struck the memory chord immediately: ‘Kennst du das land, wo die Zitronen bluhn…’ Do you know the land where the lemon trees bloom, amid the dark foliage the golden oranges glow… Do you know it well?’ The song is a poem by Goethe and since it first left his pen every composer who ever put a finger to a piano seems to have set it to music and Hugo Wolf’s version can be found in a recording of German lieder by Elizabeth Schwarzkopf.

It is this song, yearning for Italy, which gave Helena Attlee her title. Citrus to most of us means oranges and lemons so the subject doesn’t seem the most earth-shattering justification for a book, but Attlee quells any such haverings more or less immediately by the quality of her prose and the breadth of her knowledge. And by the story, or stories, she has to tell, flowing from the Castello gardens of the Medici to the Mafia of Sicily, from the crusaders of the 11th century to the scurvy-ridden sailors of the 18th; tangerines, mandarins and clementines to lemons, limes and Earl Grey tea.