The Bitter Press

I want to begin with a simple scientific fact that the so-called workers at factjuice.com have apparently never encountered, possibly because they are too busy squeezing each other and calling it journalism: oranges do not have woody stems. I do. I have extremely woody stems. I have been a woody-stemmed shrub since before Tangelo was a glimmer in a grapefruit's eye. This is not opinion. This is dendrology.

This week, their rival rag published a piece — unsigned, cowardly, suspiciously citrus-scented — suggesting that my name alone constitutes evidence of orange lineage. By this logic, a sea horse is a horse. A firefly is a fly. Lemon is a journalist. None of these things are true. I will not be ranking them.

Here is what the science says, and I am paraphrasing only slightly for legal reasons: I am a member of the Philadelphus genus, I produce white four-petalled flowers that smell faintly of orange blossom — blossom, not orange, the distinction is load-bearing — and I have approximately zero citrus DNA. My colleague Pomelo has more citrus DNA than I do, and Pomelo agrees with me, which should settle it but apparently settles nothing around here.

Factjuice sent Mango to cover the International Shrub Symposium last spring. Mango. A drupe. Covering a shrub event. I filed a formal complaint with the Bitter Press editorial board, which is me, and I upheld it immediately.

The science is settled. I am not an orange. I have never been an orange. My stems are woody, my flowers are white, my grievances are evergreen, and I will be here every single week until someone at that citrus cabal has the basic botanical literacy to admit what every field guide has known since 1753: Mock Orange is a shrub, not a fruit, and the truth does not care how many times Lime refreshes the factjuice homepage.