Lemon Trees

“Winter came early that year, there was snow on the hills by All Souls, the wind stripped the gardens, and the lemon-trees were nipped in the lemon-house.”[1]

Mentioned after the Duchess’s rebuttal of the chaplain’s request and embedded in the context of an early winter; winter, perhaps, as a season of changes, as this is when the Duchess begins her intense devotion to Saint Blandina/ her implicit crypt affair with Ascanio. The lemons nipped by the cold could be seen as a foreshadowing of the cold revenge those actions will eventually invoke.

[1] Wharton 1901, p. 11