They start appearing everywhere at this time of the year. Turn your back for five seconds and another three of them thump on to the back lawn (and bruise instantly). Ice-cream containers or cardboard cartons of them stand at suburban front gates, with notices pleading: HELP YOURSELF. FREE TO GOOD HOME.
Feijoas: there doesn’t seem to be any middle ground with them. You either breathe in their sun-and-summer scent as you anticipate that first honey-lush slide of them over the papillae (indeed, I’m salivating), or you recoil from contact, going, “Ewww! Too perfumed! Too sickly!” I offered some to a wizened conservative of my acquaintance once, and was told “No, thank you, David. I don’t eat foreign food.”
Foreign? Well, yes: they originated some 30 million years ago in Brazilian highlands and Uruguayan valleys. There’s something pleasingly incongruous about a plant with such provenance becoming commonplace in Kiwi side streets.
Raglan-based, internationally published journalist Kate Evans offers this as “a book about connections”. So it is: connections with other feijoa fanatics (Evans neatly calls them “disciples”); between plants and the animals that spread their seeds; between “tamed” varieties and environments; and of course between humans and nature. No plant is an island.
Evans is an irrepressible investigator, phoning or visiting experts across multiple continents. From its origins in South America, the feijoa was studied in Germany, collected in France, domesticated in the US and transplanted to New Zealand. She heads to virtually all venues.
You can buy a feijoa cocktail in Tbilisi. There’s a Festival de la Feijoa in the Colombian Andes. There are varieties called Mammoth and Apollo. How satisfying. All these details just from the introduction, and they keep coming.
Narratives of journeys and discoveries can easily become smug. “See where I’ve been! Look what I’ve done!” Evans mostly avoids this, except for the odd coy dirty dancing and hangover. She is too fascinated by her topic, plus, she has a decent dollop of self-deprecation. She is respectful; acknowledges the political, economic and environmental issues of the places she passes through. She’s thorough (272 end-notes). She likes her people, in an eager, bouncy sort of way.
So we go with her while she expresses breast milk into an aircraft hand-basin; finds that in Colombia, feijoas have provided an alternative to the coffee monoculture and Uber drivers have their own idiosyncratic pronunciation of the eponymous fruit. We learn about Édouard André, France’s version of Charles Darwin, who shot a lot of things, let himself be carried up steep slopes by a native porter, and found his first feijoa growing in a tree fork.
We hear how the French Riviera became a home to many exotic plant forms, despite the depredations of pirates and English tourists. And read about Mark in California, crawling around people’s gardens on feijoa hunts and persuading startled homeowners to try this foreign food.
The author and her narrative move towards Raglan, via Covid lockdown, a cosy commune, and an enormous tree in the centre of the town. Things end with celebration, migration, a meditation on identity that’s honest if not very deep.
And all the while, the details keep cascading: when you eat a feijoa, you take a trip back into the Oligocene. Second cuzzies to the species include our pōhutukawa. Americans call them pineapple guavas. Kew Gardens and botanists around the western world are facing the need to “decolonise” names that replaced indigenous ones.
Evans is clear on the science, mixes it effectively with anecdote. You learn painlessly. There are even recipes – you’ll be wanting to try feijoas with venison, or, in California, Phil’s great-granny’s pancakes.
Her writing is lucid, conventional. Adjectives and adverbs do get a fair workout, and images sometimes swell into the fanciful, but her enthusiasm excuses most of this.
She now grows the fruit in profusion on her own property. To her, the taste evokes “nostalgia”, and I reckon she’s got that spot on. Her mother couldn’t stand them, so I’ll join with Evans in offering Mum our heartfelt sympathies.
Feijoa: A Story of Belonging & Obsession by Kate Evans (Moa Press, $39.99) is out now.
