FAMILY HISTORY GROWS WITH LEMON TREES

Donna Ham likes lemons.

She enjoys fresh-squeezed lemonade on hot summer afternoons, lemon meringue pies and just about anything else you can make out of lemons.

And for good reason, too. Ham has two lemon trees which produce the sour fruit the size of softballs.

"Sometimes I have to prop a shovel up under the branches to keep them from breaking under the weight of the lemons," Ham said. "They can really be a strain on the little trees."

Ham's lemons are not like the lemons you can find in stores. Each piece of fruit carries with it a bit of history.

Soon after Ham married her husband, Don, he told her of his grandfather's lemon tree, rooted in Arkansas.

"He told me it grew fruit the size of bowling balls," said Ham. "I really didn't believe him."

But that all changed in 1968, when the Hams got their first lemon tree cutting from a descendant of the legendary tree.

"It took a couple of years for the tree to start producing fruit," said Ham. "The whole time I was sure that it wasn't going to grow or that I would kill it or something.

"But sure enough, about two years later we had lemons."

Since then, Ham has been taking cuttings of her own off the trees and growing new ones. Her Cape Girardeau home has become a greenhouse as she plants the snippets in coffee cans filled with a mixture of growing soil and manure, with a dash of fertilizer.

"A lot of people ask for cuttings of the lemon trees," said Ham. "I give them to friends and relatives at Christmas or on other special occasions, but most of them I keep for myself."

This year, Ham gave her daughter Janice, a dispatcher for the Cape Girardeau Police Department, her first tree.

"Janice always said she would kill a tree if I gave her one because she claims she doesn't know anything about plants," Ham said. "I think she'll do just fine. But if she does kill it, I've got more."

Ham, a retired school teacher and 4-H extension coordinator for the University of Missouri, calls the growing of lemon trees "the closest thing I have to a hobby."

The Ham family tree legacy almost died about ten years ago when the Hams moved to Kennett to teach school.

Between April 1 and Oct. 15 -- depending on the weather -- Ham leaves her three- to five-foot trees outdoors to enjoy the sunshine and fresh air. The rest of the year, they live indoors in an east window. If a heating vent is kept between the trees and the windows during the fall and winter, they can be fooled into now shedding their leaves annually, she said.

While in Kennett, Ham had left the trees outside when the cotton growers sprayed their crops to defoliate. The trees became sickly and soon died.

"I was heartbroken," Ham said. "I had just given all of my clippings away before we moved. The only thing I had was a couple of small clippings in a vinegar jug."

Ham tended to the clippings for weeks, until they took root and started looking promising.

The trees bloom mainly in the summer months, Ham said.

"The trees will have dozens of blooms on them -- pretty white flowers with little yellow centers -- but not all of them grow into trees," she said. "They are truly beautiful trees, especially when they are in full bloom. And the smell is out of this world."

Now, Ham is beginning to experiment with growing trees from the seeds of the lemons others bear.

"Someone once told me that you couldn't grow a fruit-producing tree from the seeds, but I have a friend who just got his first lemons off a tree he grew from the seeds," she said.

When she's not growing lemon trees or gardening, Ham keeps busy working for the Visiting Nurses Association, assisting elderly and home-bound people with their daily needs.

"I love my lemon trees," said Ham. "I only wish I had kept better records on the growth and the ancestry of all the trees that have been borne of the original cutting in 1968. It would be like having a family tree for my lemon trees."