It's a limeberry!

My family has had this shrub/bush for as long as I can remember. It started as a small shrub planted in a 12" clay pot. Then when we moved to our new home, we got some cuttings to plant around a coconut tree in our front yard. Together those cuttings grew to form an immense thorny shrub nearly nine feet tall and who knows how many feet around. (The original plant sadly dried up during a heat wave. Sniff!)

We didn't know much about it but would just refer to it as "lemoncito". Sometimes we would harvest the fruit and cook them in sugar and water to make a sweet dessert/preserve. I've asked around to find out what this plant really is, trying my best to describe the waxy leaves, tiny red fruits that grow to no more than half an inch in diameter and thorny branches, but to no avail. I also searched the web for more information about "lemoncito" but got nowhere. The term "lemoncito", it turns out, is used in various parts of the world to refer to all sorts of fruits belonging to the Citrus family.

But the good news is, the mystery is now solved. I took some photos of the tiny fruit some months ago while testing the macro mode of my brand new camera and posted the photo recently on my Flickr account. Then I came across this "What Plant is That?" group and posted the photo there yesterday hoping somebody could identify this plant whose real name has been long a mystery to me. Lo and behold! Tony from Sydney posted a comment today saying that it belonged to the Citrus family and is called Triphasia trifolia. I checked the webpage he included, and yep, on the page were pictures of "lemoncito" whose common name was, after all, limeberry.