Family's legacy in fruitgrowing

John and Judy Paynter with a framed photograph of great-grandfather John Paynter, who started the family's fruit growing in Hawke's Bay. Photo / Paul Taylor

More than 1 centuries and five generations of a family's apple growing in New Zealand will be celebrated at a family reunion in Havelock North at the weekend.

It will be hosted by John Paynter and sister Judy Bark, drawing together first cousins of the fifth generation of family members since William and Sarah Paynter arrived in New Plymouth - on the barque Amelia Thompson - with an infant son in September 1841.

According to the published passenger list, William Paynter was an agricultural labourer but the apple story didn't really start until great-grandfather John Paynter went to Nelson and began growing apples and stone fruit at Stoke in 1862.

At the start of last century, he and sons Leonard, Ralph and Horace reckoned the economy and population would become based in the North Island and made the move to Hawke's Bay, settling in St Georges Rd, just out of Hastings.

It was there that they started planting their first fruit trees in Hawke's Bay on what had been a small sheep paddock, and now 32 cousins from Melbourne, Auckland and Christchurch will come to see how this branch of the family tree has grown - an unashamed showing-off of Hawke's Bay.

Most have never been to Hastings, for it tended to be the Paynters of Hastings who did the visiting to the cousins in the city, the kids excited by rides on trains and trams. Says Judy: "We were the country bumpkins."

It was John Paynter, the modern variety and now 74, who developed the operation that is known through such names as The Yummy Fruit Company, registered in 1973, and Johnny Appleseed Orchards (1981), and has employed hundreds of people in the region every year. He was on the board of ENZA, formerly the Apple and Pear Marketing Board, for about 20 years, and his service to horticulture was recognised 16 years ago - in 2000 - when he was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

But this is "not about me", he says, thinking of how it is that a family has remained in the industry so long, now going another round with he and wife Janice's sons Paul and Jonathon as fellow directors in the enterprise.

"There lots of stories," he says. Judy says he must get them written down.

He wonders what might not have been, for his father, Leonard's son Howard, was shot in a "bank accident" - the misfiring of a weapon kept for security purposes - in Wellington in 1923.

The near-death experience resulted in him returning to Hawke's Bay and so another seed was sown.

In the company headquarters, the house where they grew up and alongside a packing shed which occupies the area of what was once the family orchard, they say: "We might not have even been here."