Grower gives new life to the has-

ELAINE REEVES

IF Mark Christensen’s mission succeeds, New Zealanders in decades to come will be eating nourishing foods that can stand up to the warmer wetter and/or drier weather coming towards us.

Mark is founder of the Heritage Food Crops Research Trust, the research garden of which runs behind his house (and several others in his street) in Whanganui. on the North Island’s west coast.

The trust is researching ancient grains, peaches and plums, apples, tomatoes and, on which I shall focus today, heritage beans.

Readers with long memories might recall a story I wrote in 2009 about Mark’s work. It centred on an apple Mark stumbled upon and called Monty’s Surprise, which proved to be the apple a day that keeps the doctor away — scientific analysis shows it is particularly good at protecting against illnesses.

At that time Mark was co-ordinating the Great New Zealand Bean Hunt — scouring the country of heritage varieties brought to the country by gold miners, railway builders, kauri gum diggers and such before quarantine restrictions stopped the free flow of plant material.

That was very successful at

Mark said: “It is just so beautiful, I fell in love with it and thought we need to have that, then thought if we are going to have that, what else can we have?”

A not-for-profit in the US agreed to grow the beans for the