Sweeping, engrossing and fruity history

I first heard about Kate Evans’ debut book, Feijoa, several years ago. Evans, who is, among other things, a freelance science journalist, was doing some writing for the magazine I was editing and mentioned, in passing, that she was working on a book that focused on this aromatic oval autumn fruit.

And I must admit I thought to myself at the time, surely there would not be enough to say?

Don’t get me wrong, I like feijoas as much as the next person (caveat: assuming the next person wasn’t Kate Evans, as she is frankly obsessed). But surely, feijoas – their history and cultural significance, their breeding and cultivation and maybe a recipe or two – merited a medium-length feature story at the very most?

Well, can I start by saying I was wrong about that.

In Feijoa, Evans’ sweeping and engrossing history of the titular fruit, she traces their history back 23 million years (or so), iterating the role the fruit has played in different cultures, at different times and in different people’s lives.

Along the way, she explores the plant’s botanical origins in South America, travels to a feijoa festival in Colombia, tries to find the Mediterranean villa where a French landscape gardener and plant hunter planted the first feijoa ever grown in Europe sometime in the 1880s, and visits the German herbarium where some of botanist Friedrich Sellow’s samples are housed (feijoas have the botanical name of Feijoa sellowiana, previously Acca sellowiana; and the species name is in honour of Friedrich who was the first person to

send samples of feijoa leaves and flowers to Europe).

Botany, science, history, politics, human rights, philosophy and even economics (although the feijoa’s incredible economic potential – while widely agreed to exist – is generally thought to not yet have been realised) are all deftly woven into and around Evans’ personal narrative, which is itself sprinkled with arcane and intriguing

asides (in Colombia, they add broken bites of cheese to hot chocolate: must try).

Naturally, the story starts and ends in Aotearoa— the fruit was possibly imported here, Evans writes, by the Whanganui nurseryman Alexander Allison, who also gets credit for being the first person to grow and commercialise kiwifruit in New Zealand. Indeed, the most compelling part of the book for me was Evans’ reflections on New Zealand’s and New Zealanders’ relationship with the so-called “socialist fruit”, how it has become “part of our nation’s story” as well as part of her own sense of identity, inextricably wound into her relationship with her homeland.

I started reading Feijoa thinking it would slot comfortably into the sub-genre of books that tell the surprisingly complicated histories of individual, edible things (think Mark Kurlansky’s Cod, Salt or Milk; Erika Janik’s Apple; or Tom Mueller’s Extra Virginity, which delves into the slippery history of olive oil).

And to an extent, it does. I enjoyed the aforementioned books and would recommend them, but for me at least, Feijoa felt more vivid and more relevant, undoubtedly because it was so much closer to home (literally, so, there is a feijoa tree in my home garden). It proves to be an unexpectedly illuminating story about plants, people and places and all the ways they have – and continue – to intersect and shape the world.

Jo McCarroll has edited NZ Gardener since 2010. She lives in a central Auckland suburb on a section crammed with vege beds, fruit trees and flowers. Her first book, Vege Patch from Scratch, was released in 2023 and she was the 2023 winner of the Horticultural Communications medal from the RNZIH.

All the ingredients for Nadia’s easy recipe for your family can be found in Bargain Box.

TOM LEE/STUFF Kate Evans was awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship to travel to Brazil, Colombia and France to research her first book, a “biography” of the feijoa.