The Lime Festival - Its Origins (a somewhat true fable)

The Lime festival began in 2003. It had a strange beginning. This story accounts for some aspects of that beginning and the goings on at that festival. Some of the names have been changed to protect the ignorant.

The Lime Festival - Its Origins (a somewhat true fable)

There were two families; lets call them the Bountys and the Barrens.

The Bountys had a citrus tree which was much admired by the Barrens.
Mr Bounty, being a thoughtful man, felt this deep gap in his friend’s world and presented to him, on his birthday, a potted Lime Tree.

The next day, a Sunday, Mr Barren excitedly planted the tree in a vacant spot in his garden - west of the spreading macadamia and east of the loquat tree. From that day he lovingly tended it weekend in and weekend out. He watered it by hand; he sprayed it with soap suds to fight off the ants and scale insects; he peed on it occasionally because he had heard that this worked wonders for the productivity of citrus trees – something to do with husbandry and hormones he mistakenly believed; he pruned, ever so gently, and waited and watched and waited and waited.

Each year Mr Bounty’s Tahitian Lime produced an avalanche of fruit and these would be shared with Mr Barren and his family in a non patronising and wholly generous spirit. And each year Mr Barren would watch as the fruit budded on his tree and struggled to survive and finally, each year, produce nothing.

Mr Barren was not naturally gifted when it came to gardening and hated nothing more than reading instructions, which is why he had inadvertently planted his beloved Lime Tree in a shady spot on poorly drained shaly ground. Still this was not known to him at that time and each year he found another excuse for his recalcitrant Tahitian.

After fiveyears, during which he obsessively loved that tree (call it a tree, yet it was still below his shoulder in height) his patience and obstinate optimism bore fruit in the form of a solitary lime. So amazing was this event and so heaven sent, that Mr Barren decided that this indeed was a blessed fruit worthy of celebration. He called his circle of friends and, in a state most of them could not comprehend (apart from Mr Bounty and his wife who had been witnesses to this agony), invited them to gather at his house to celebrate this unique event. Mr Barren, who had a penchant for excess decided to call this the Hill End Lime Festival, for that is where he lived with his wife and two bemused children. He did not regard this as self indulgent or grandiose but simply apt. And so began the Lime Festival.