By Kate Evans*
Kate Evans admires an ancient feijoa tree in Cannes, France. Photo: Supplied
Here in Raglan the summer has felt endless, perfect. Not a single cyclone, barely any rain, just blue skies and long days and warm dusky surfs until the glow is gone and only starlight shows the way down the dark glassy waves. My festival costumes rarely required a jacket. I spent lazy hours in the hammock on the deck with my daughters while we all read our own books about dragons. (Theirs, graphic novels. Mine, just… graphic.)
But this week, for the first time, there was a chill to the morning air. And right on cue, the first handful of feijoas fell from our Unique and Kaiteri, the two earliest varieties. Of course I burrowed straight into the grass and ate almost all of them - although I did save a couple for the kids.
Usually, my partner and I look forward to autumn. The change in the light, the harvests, the kids actually going to bed before 9pm, the gathering momentum of the year's projects. This time, though, I've enjoyed such a lush sunny season I don't want it to end. I keep thinking of how my friend Josh once called feijoas a 'consolation fruit' - a solace for the dying days of summer.
A year ago, the onset of feijoa season felt like a beginning rather than an ending. My book-length love letter to the feijoa was launched into the world at the start of March 2024. For one loop around the sun I've officially been the 'mad feijoa lady of Raglan', as my New Zealand Geographic publisher James once predicted I'd become.
Kate (left) helping to judge the feijoa desserts competition at the Festival of the Feijoa in Tibasosa, Colombia. Photo: Supplied
I've enthused about the fruit and explained their quirky history, contemporary meanings, and the science of their smell on stages in Auckland, Sydney, Canberra, Queenstown, Wanaka, and Hamilton. I made feijoa ceviche in front of a crowd at WOMAD in New Plymouth, appeared on Seven Sharp, wrote about feijoas for the New York Times, and spoke about them on Australian radio and American podcasts.
Feijoas - the 'people's fruit' - connect communities when we share them with colleagues or leave a box out on the street. Similarly, the process of reporting the book forged relationships between me and a network of people from here to Uruguay to Colombia to France that I dubbed the 'Fellowship of the Feijoa.'
By the time the book came out, I'd been collecting tales of the feijoa for a decade. Now that I've gone public with my obsession, they're coming to me. At social or work events, people tell me their feijoa stories-the enormous tree in their grandmother's garden, or how much they missed the fruit when they lived in London. People ask my advice about which varieties to plant (some early, some late), why their tree isn't fruiting (it needs a friend, and pollinating birds), and how best to propagate them (this one is definitely beyond my writer's skillset.)
Kate Evans' book. Photo: Kate Evans
I get emails, too. Andrew, a surgeon, wrote to tell me of his passion for botany and the beloved, 'generously productive' feijoa tree outside his office in Hamilton. Bev lamented the guava moth, a pest afflicting feijoas north of the Waikato. "I used to often just bite the end off a feijoa and suck out the contents but I no longer dare! Have now a much more measured approach with a knife and spoon so that I don't ingest bugs. A great shame as I no longer gobble some as I am gathering."
Dean read the book while walking the Paparoa Track and wrote to tell me that it made his "heart sing with joy"- and about a rare variety he grows in the Far North that "at first bite tastes like banana that then turns to feijoa flavours (I mean, WTF!!!)"
It's not just New Zealanders who love feijoas. I have French and Portuguese feijoa pocketpals now. An Argentinian feijoa enthusiast frequently sends me rambling Whatsapp voice notes with technical questions I can rarely answer. Yuanshou Long, who discovered feijoas in Hong Kong in 2017 and is now growing 1600 trees in a remote mountain village in China, bought the book as soon as it came out and sent me a photo of him holding it - as well as pictures of the delicious-looking feijoas he harvests.
And a Dutch artist and feijoa-fanatic wrote to the Brazilian geneticist and feijoa scientist Rubens Nodari after reading about him in my book, to propose a collaboration on crossing and selecting hyperlocal feijoa varieties suitable for different parts of Europe.
As I always hoped, sharing my feijoa obsession has sparked surprising connections between people across continents, and a closer affinity between readers and this one special plant. Now, when I pick up the season's first fruit from the parched summer grass, it no longer tastes only of home-but also of stories, of adventures, even of love.
Consolation, indeed.
* Kate Evans is a freelance journalist and the author of Feijoa: A Story of Obsession and Belonging.
