I live just SE of San Antonio, in La Vernia, and I have all my citrus in the ground, to include Key Lime, Persian lime, and of course Meyers lemon. Most of my plants have been in the ground for 10 yrs or more. Although I do toss a blanket over the key lime if its' supposed to get in the mid twenties, thats about all I've ever done, and not suffered any damage. I think one time it gone down into the teens and some of the leaves got a little crunchy ;-) and Key limes are supposed to be very delicate as far as cold wx goes. Right now all my citrus is going mad with blooms, its incrdible! I'm going to have a ton of fruit thats for sure! Here is a pic I took the other day of the key lime, look at all the blossoms! And this little tree is a producing son of a gun, its always loaded with limes, pretty much year round.

@GregBradley: Thanks. Johnmerr made a similar point about my lawn possibly imposing harmful effect on my citrus trees. This is new info for me...Thanks. FYI, I use the black rings to keep the grass away from the tree truck, and not to keep the mulch around the tree. The ring also acts as a bumper guard for my lawn mower:). Also, in the photo you may have noticed the gray PVC trunk guard around the base of the tree used to protect it from my weed wacker. Now that I think back, several weeks before my Variegated lemon tree started to loose it's leaves, I did some heavy de-thatching on my lawn. After removing the thatch, I've been trying to bring the greenness of the lawn back with applications of lawn fertilizer (high nitrogen) every 3 weeks, and watering via sprinkler twice daily. In conjunction with the above, we've been had some heavy down pours caused by a passing hurricane. So as you said, it's most likely a combo of those factors (water, drainage, fertilizer, weak cultivar) coming together wrong for the lemon tree. Think I'll do as Johnmerr recommends, and see it shows any signs of coming back. If it don't, I'll replace it with something else. May even switch to planting a pomegranate tree. Aloha, Gadget

JoeP450, it all likelihood the albino branch will eventually die off, but by the same token, that is not a certainty. Theorizing again, while the branch is still small, there is not as much of an energy expense in transporting sugars to keep the cells alive, but as it continues to grow, it will probably reach a point where it becomes unsustainable. The thought behind the double graft is that, if sucessful, the sugars would have to be transported through the white portion, bringing down that transport cost considerably. I'm sure that there are similarities between horticulture and pharmacology. I would speculate that to become a pharmacologies, you would have taken several chemistry/biochemistry courses, all of which will serve you well in horticulture. The best part of horticulture over pharmacology is that you can experiment and try different things and at worst you lose a plant. lol And IMHO, most people who call themselves experts are full of bs!

Denise - I just looked at mine and it has some tiny thorns, about 1/8" long, on the newer branches - similar to my regular Eureka. Here is a pic of one of the younger branches (the older branches don't have thorns) - Variegated Pink (Eureka) lemon thorns - I.e., it's not like the giant thorns that I saw on my regular Eureka's rootstock (which I believe is Cuban Shaddock). That rootstock had sent out a shoot last summer that had thorns that were pretty shocking and alerted me to something "wrong"! LOL I cut the shoot off after identifying it. Regular Eureka lemon rootstock shoot last summer (huge thorn circled, graft is a couple inches above the yellow tag) -