Skip to content

Your account

With an account, your progress (modules read, XP, badges, cards, notebook, pack, challenges) follows you on every device. Without one, it stays in this browser.

or
Harmless🍽️ Edible

🍋 Finger lime

Citrus australasica · Rutaceae

🦘 Australia
🧠 To remember it“A lemon that bursts like caviar” — squeezing the finger lime fruit releases tiny juice pearls that pop in your mouth, unlike the pulp of classic lemons.
Finger lime — Citrus australasica

🔍 Identify it without mistakes

Spiny shrub or small tree growing up to 10 m, with sharp 2.5 cm thorns and alternate light green oval to lozenge-shaped leaves. The fruit, cylindrical and elongated (~8 cm), with rough and oily green-yellow to pink skin, contains pulp made of small juice pearls that burst in your mouth.

  1. sharp thorns up to 2.5 cm on twigs
  2. light green, oval to lozenge-shaped alternate leaves
  3. elongated cylindrical fruit (~8 cm), rough oily skin
  4. pulp made of loose small juice vesicles ("citrus caviar"), without standard citrus inner membranes
Sizeup to 10 m
Floweringsouthern hemisphere spring, fruits in late summer-autumn
Habitatcoastal rainforest and open forest edges, often on basalt-derived soils, from southeastern Queensland to northeastern New South Wales

⚠️ Not to be confused with

Desert lime (Citrus glauca) (Citrus glauca)aucun (comestible aussi)

To tell them apart: the finger lime has an elongated, finger-shaped cylindrical fruit while the desert lime (another native Australian citrus) produces a small round fruit the size of a marble; both are edible native citrus species with no risk of toxic confusion

🍽️ Eating it

Partsripe fruits
Seasonsouthern hemisphere late summer-autumn
Tastetangy and zesty in the mouth, close to classic lime

Preparation : eat fresh by cutting the fruit in half and squeezing out the small juice vesicles ("citrus caviar"); also used in marmalades, pickle condiments, and the dried peel serves as seasoning

💊 Healing with it

traditionally used by Indigenous Australians for hydration and treating skin infections

Level of evidence : traditional use — Wikipedia — Citrus australasica

⚠️ no specific precautions known

🪓 Other bushcraft uses

  • booming commercial cultivation since the 1990s, especially for gourmet dining
Sources (1)

No entry replaces a certain identification in the field, or medical advice. When in doubt: don't eat it. If ingestion is suspected: poison control or 112/911.