KATE EVANS is an award-winning journalist and nature writer from New Zealand, though she has also called Australia home. Her work has been published in The Guardian, Scientific American, National Geographic, Undark, and BioGraphic. She is a regular contributor to New Zealand Geographic magazine and has won multiple national media awards for science and environmental journalism and feature writing. She has also worked as a television producer and video journalist for the BBC, ABC, TVNZ, and the Washington Post, reporting from West Africa, Indonesia, the Whanganui River and the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings.

For the feijoa-lovers,
from 4000 years ago to today

Prologue

Let me introduce you to this plant that has become my obsession, this fruit that feels like home for me. Here is the one in our garden: a straggling thing, just a few years old. When I am old, it will be a good-sized tree with a gnarled trunk wider than my waist, but for now, it is a compact bush the height of my head. In winter, it is unremarkable. Grey-brown branches. Shiny, dark green leaves flash silver underneath in the low sunlight. A pīwakawaka, the curious native fantail, pauses on a twig. She flicks her splayed tail-feathers side to side and darts away.

In early spring, the tree puts forth fresh leaves, paler green, as soft and faintly furry as my littlest girl’s cheek. Not long after I hear the welcome cry of the pīpīwharauroa, or shining cuckoo, returning to these shores from its winter sojourn in the tropics, our tree bursts into flower. A bright spray of crimson stamens, each daubed with a dot of yellow pollen. Six cup-shaped petals, sugar-white on the outside, blush deepening to full-blown embarrassment on the inside. Scattered over the bush in profusion, the overall effect is of a star-spangled sky, or a Christmas tree covered in lights – just in time for the midsummer festivities here in the south of the world. Better still, these flowers are edible. Each white petal is fleshy, juicy and sweet, the flavour a gentle promise of the tangy fruit to come.

All through the summer the fruit ripen, beginning as tiny velvety orbs at the base of each flower and swelling into bright green ovals. Finally, just at the moment when summer slides into autumn – when the bar-tailed godwits leave the New Zealand mudflats and fly to Alaska via their refuelling grounds in North Korea, when the setting sun tracks back towards the Whāingaroa harbour mouth, and the dropping humidity sharpens the silhouette of Karioi, my local bush-clad volcano – the fruit begin to fall. Overnight, one or two stems gently release their hold on the branches. The first fruits thud to the ground. In the morning, they are waiting for me in the damp grass. I pick one up, cut it in half crossways with a knife, ready my spoon.

This tree has many names, including pineapple guava, kanakreĩn and guayabo del país, but I have always known it as feijoa: a strange-sounding word which we New Zealanders pronounce something like FEE-jo-ah.

INTRODUCTION:

A Cultivated Obsession

The scent comes first, when you sink your knife – or your teeth – into a feijoa’s skin. It is zingy, heady, a burst of bright perfumed flavour unlike any other. In New Zealand, the traditional method is to scoop out the creamy-clear insides with a teaspoon and discard the skins, though in other parts of the world people simply eat them whole. In the centre, the flesh is translucent and jelly-like where the tiny seeds hang in spiralled suspension. Closer to the skin, it is opaque and slightly gritty. Some have compared the taste to a mixture of pineapples and strawberries, but really, the flavour is something all its own. In the United States, where feijoas are called pineapple guavas, a 1912 newspaper article declared, ‘he who drinks beer, thinks beer. But he who eats pineapple guava thinks of pineapple, raspberries, and banana, all at once.’¹

My love affair with feijoas began with the walk home from school on shortening April afternoons, the light as crisp as a Granny Smith apple. My sisters and I would cast off our school-bags and sit under the feijoa tree on our rural gravel driveway, armed with a spoon and a knife – or sometimes just our teeth. We were only allowed one chocolate egg at Easter, but we could eat as many of these sweet green orbs as we wanted.

My Australian-born mother couldn’t stand the taste, but she would happily gather buckets of them for the rest of us when she went up to the orchard to feed the chickens. The plum, apple, lemon and guava trees were enclosed from the wind – and the cows – in a protective hedge of seedling feijoas. They produced fruit that was very variable in size, shape and quality, and most we just let rot into the grass. If you stood on one by accident, the liquified insides squirted out between your bare toes (we were always barefoot). Some New Zealanders, I was later told, call feijoas ‘lawnmower fruit’, because as kids mowing lawns for pocket money they would be instructed to simply run over the fallen feijoas, puréeing hundreds into a sticky, pungent mess.

At our place at Leigh, on the still-rural border of Auckland and Northland, the best fruit came from Dad’s specimen tree on the driveway. By the time Monica and I were teenagers, and Tessa at primary school, it produced enough large, delicious feijoas to last most of the season. Usually, we could keep up with that tree just by eating them fresh, and my father and I shared a particular love of feijoas on our muesli. He experimented with making feijoa ice cream (delicious), and later, feijoa wine (not so much).

Feijoas reeled me in as a child, and I think they did it on purpose. The plant’s whole strategy – honed over millions of years of evolution – is to attract animals to their juicy, tasty fruit, in the hope we will spread their seeds far and wide. Humans might think that in domesticating plants we have turned them to our own ends, but as Michael Pollan writes in The Botany of Desire, the reverse is also true: ‘it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees’.² By appealing to our desires, certain plants have inspired us to plant them, protect them, transport them across oceans, and even write books about them.

Feijoas haven’t done this quite so triumphantly as the apple, potato, tulip and cannabis plants that Pollan profiles. But they have still been astoundingly successful: of the world’s roughly 30,000 edible plant species, only around 150 are now cultivated for human consumption. Most of those were domesticated hundreds or thousands of years ago. Feijoas are one of the very few plants that have made this journey from the wild to the orchard in the last few generations – meaning they provide an unusual opportunity to watch, up close, how plants worm their way into our collective hearts.

From its homelands in Uruguay, southern Brazil, and a skerrick of Argentina, the feijoa induced humans to help it conquer the world – or a few far-flung, particular parts of it, anyway. First, the south of France, where feijoas were cultivated among date palms, eucalypts and New Zealand pōhutukawa in the exotic Riviera gardens of the European aristocracy. From there, we obligingly carried them to subtropical gardens in both hemispheres, from Azerbaijan to Egypt, Japan to Australia. Today, if you look, you can find feijoas growing on the Gaza Strip and at Disney World in Florida. You can order a feijoa cocktail in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. In just a few places, they took hold, entered into the hearts of the people, and became entwined with culture and cuisine, memory and celebration.

One of those places was my birthplace, New Zealand. Feijoa season here – extending roughly from March to the beginning of June – is a time of profligate generosity. Kids sell them for a pittance at roadside stalls. People take bagfuls of feijoas to the office and give them away to co-workers. Others leave laden wheelbarrows parked outside their houses, with handwritten signs reading ‘help yourself’ propped up among the bounty. Because of this gifting, they are sometimes called ‘the people’s fruit’. For me, and for many other New Zealanders, feijoas have become a kind of unofficial national emblem, a totemic symbol of home.

Every year, that first glistening mouthful evokes a powerful rush of something like nostalgia. There is no proper term in English for this flavour-prompted feeling, but two words, one from the feijoa’s native land (Brazil) and one from that of my distant Evans ancestors (Wales), come close: the Portuguese ‘saudade’ and the Welsh ‘hiraeth’: a bittersweet sort of homesickness, a wistful longing for a faraway land.

My preoccupation with this humble green fruit took me on a decade-long journey across four continents to discover its origins and its story. This book’s pollination occurred when I was thirty, newly arrived home in New Zealand with my Australian partner Sam, after twelve years living overseas. It flowered through my thirties, growing up alongside our two little girls and the feijoa trees we planted on the land in Raglan we bought with my sister Monica and her partner Manu.³ It’s now bearing fruit as a published book, just after my fortieth birthday.

I spent my late teens and twenties exploring far from New Zealand. A high-school exchange in Italy; studying journalism, Spanish and history in Sydney, where I met Sam; internships at newspapers in Cambodia and Argentina; becoming a journalist at the ABC in Canberra; travelling alone to Guinea and Mali for a dance camp and a music festival; and moving with Sam to Indonesia where he worked on his PhD while I made videos and wrote articles about deforestation for a tropical forest research organisation. I went hang-gliding in Rio de Janeiro, journeyed on a boat with no toilet for two days up the Congo River, and survived dengue fever in Turkey. I didn’t quite check off all the outlandish activities on the list my high-school friends made for me of ‘Things to do before you turn 30’, though I came pretty close.

But still, I felt the pull of home, especially on those occasions when I managed to find a single, expensive feijoa (I once paid $3 for one at a Canberra market). On my trips back to New Zealand, I’d begun to feel that the place was moving on without me, and that the umbilical cord anchoring my heart to my homeland was beginning to stretch and slip. I worried that if I didn’t return soon, I never would; I would create a life elsewhere, I would change too much. In the national online encyclopedia, Te Ara, I read a quote from New Zealand writer John Mulgan’s Report on Experience (1947):

They come from the most beautiful country in the world, but it is a small country and very remote. After a while this isolation oppresses them and they go abroad. They roam the world looking not for adventure but for satisfaction. They run service cars in Iraq, gold-mines in Nevada, or newspapers in Fleet Street. They are a queer, lost, eccentric, pervading people who will seldom admit to the deep desire that is in all of them to go home and live quietly in New Zealand again.⁴

That desire become increasingly insistent as I neared the end of my twenties. When a job came up at TVNZ as a current affairs producer, I applied and got it. Sam and I moved from Java to Auckland at the end of 2013, a couple of weeks before our thirtieth birthdays.

I wasn’t sure what re-entry would be like. It was surprisingly seamless, though in some ways I still felt like something of a foreigner. But that first autumn, stuffing myself with unlimited fresh feijoas under a smog-free sky made me feel that I’d made the right decision to come back – that I really was home, if not yet fully rooted. And as I thought more about my favourite fruit and the outsized emotional effect it had on me, I had questions. Lots of questions.

Firstly, how did this alchemy happen? Why did this South American fruit become so loved in New Zealand, but not in France or Australia? What can that tell us about the influence of botany on culture, and vice versa? Whether it’s pumpkins in North America, grapes in France, tomatoes in Italy, potatoes in Ireland, oranges in Spain, maize in Central America, or rice in Asia, the plants we use to make food and drink become an integral part of custom and tradition. Often, though, the supposedly local plants we use to give us a kind of national or regional identity end up having deep historical roots that stretch across the globe. Tomatoes and potatoes are originally South American, grapes were domesticated in the South Caucasus (present-day Georgia and Azerbaijan, where feijoas now thrive), oranges originated in the Himalayan foothills – and the feijoa comes from the highlands of southern Brazil, the undulating valleys of Uruguay and a fragment of northern Argentina.

I wanted to know more of its origins than just geography. How did the feijoa evolve, and how did the tree’s relationships with the plants and animals of the ecosystem around it shape it into the form it has today? I wondered about the first people to eat one, and what the fruit might have meant to them. I wanted to know what feijoas mean today in their ancestral home, and I visited both Uruguay and Brazil, years apart, to find out.

The more I discovered, the more questions I had. I wanted to learn about Friedrich Sellow, the nineteenth-century German naturalist honoured in the plant’s Latin name (Feijoa sellowiana), who was responsible for sending the first dried-out feijoa specimens to Europe. I wanted to understand the stories behind the feijoa’s various scientific, common and indigenous names, and why the feijoa never made it big in the United States, even though it was predicted to be ‘the fruit of the century’ there. And from the moment I heard about Colombia’s Festival de la Feijoa in the tiny Andean town of Tibasosa, I knew that one day I had to go.

‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe’, wrote the North American ‘father of conservation’ John Muir, who in 1911 travelled in Brazil among the feijoa’s ancestral forests – though it’s not recorded whether he tasted one.⁵ Researching this book, that’s exactly what I found. As I tried to pick out the feijoa’s story, I realised it was entangled in larger forces and ideas: evolution and exploration, domestication and gift-giving, nostalgia and neuroscience, slavery and colonisation, conflict and reconciliation, knowledge lost and knowledge reclaimed.

In following the feijoa from South America to New Zealand – via German museums, the French Riviera, California’s Central Valley and a small town in the Colombian Andes – I discovered a gamut of ways that humans relate to plants, and the different kinds of meaning we derive from them: as food, as medicine, as spoils of empire, as livelihood, as purpose, as resistance, as objects of desire, as symbols of identity. And as a Pākehā New Zealander, with British ancestors who first settled here in the early twentieth century, I began to question what it meant for both me and the feijoa to belong to this place.

These explorations happened in the margins, whenever I could carve out a fragment of space from parenting and my paid writing work, as my thirties unfolded and I began to make a home as an adult in New Zealand. A few years into my research for this book, my sister Monica had a dream that we would raise our kids together. It seemed prophetic, and it was. A month later – thanks to the banks of various mums and dads, a rushed sale and a poorly attended winter auction – we were the joint owners, with our partners, of nearly a hectare of southwest-sloping land in central Raglan, complete with a couple of small houses and a tiny, century-old rimu cabin.⁶ A few months after that, we both fell pregnant in the same week.

While Sam and I stayed in Auckland, Monica and Manu moved onto the land and began to care for it. There was a lot to do – weeding, tree-felling, planting natives, making the cabin liveable, turning a vine-choked ditch into lawn. Manu had lots of ideas and the skills to execute them. Monica got excited about alpacas, and soon afterwards a trio of living lawnmowers arrived in the bottom paddock. But after more than a decade of renting, my priority was some feijoas of my own. I went to a North Shore garden centre and bought cultivars: Kaiteri and Unique, Mammoth and Apollo, and one little Kakapo – I loved imagining the round green fruit as a fat green parrot.

The next time we made the trip to Raglan for a working bee, the feijoas came with us, their tips brushing the roof of our old van’s boot. Planting these spindly seedlings with my family that weekend felt like a kind of commitment to place, a conjuring of an imagined future when we would live here and eat their fruit year after year. It was a gamble. I wasn’t sure if I could really transform myself from the ‘anywhere person’ I’d been through my twenties to a ‘somewhere person’ – but the feijoas were a way of sinking literal roots into the land and community where we’d chosen to make our home.⁷

This book is about the feijoa, but it’s also about how people create culture, and how we weave certain plants into our sense of who we are. For millennia, plants have been one strand from which humans have constructed their sense of belonging and of place. It’s no accident that the root of the word ‘culture’ is ‘cultivation’. The philosopher Edward S. Casey wrote: ‘The very word culture meant “place tilled” in Middle English, and the same word goes back to [the] Latin colere, “to inhabit, care for, till, worship.” To be cultural, to have a culture, is to inhabit a place sufficiently intensely to cultivate it – to be responsible for it, to respond to it, to attend to it caringly. Where else but in particular places can culture take root?’⁸

In my travels in search of the feijoa, that intensity of attention is exactly what I found: people with a strong love of plants and of place, whose obsession with this one particular fruit was an expression of their care for the land they walked on and their love for the people around them. Plants change us, even as we change them – and in the feijoa’s case, it revealed more to me than I ever could have expected.

ORIGINS

Brazil

CHAPTER 1

In its Natural Habitat

As the plane from Santiago to Florianópolis crossed the Andes, I thought about the very first time I’d seen those glacier-slung mountains. When I was twenty-three, I’d lived in Argentina, perfecting my Spanish, reporting for an English-language newspaper, and travelling overland through Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay. One weekend, I took a twenty-four-hour bus ride over the mountains from Buenos Aires to Valparaíso, Chile, to meet Monica for a drumming festival – she was studying at the university there. A picture of us dancing half-naked in the street wearing not much more than body paint had made the front page of a local tabloid. (The headline was ‘¡De exportación!’ – translating, roughly, as ‘export quality’.)

Now, it was March 2019, and I was squeezing jets of breastmilk into the cramped airplane toilet sink. Exploring South America alone again was a familiar and exciting prospect, but this time, I felt as though I’d left part of me behind as ballast – Sam, our two little girls, and our home in Raglan, where we’d moved six months earlier. Before leaving, I’d breastfed seventeen-month-old Indigo for what I thought might be the last time. I had never been away from her for more than a night, and expected my milk might dry up during the eight days I would be away.

I often feel torn between two great tidal forces I’ve come to call ‘the hearth’ and ‘the wild’. The hearth stands for the desire for stability, family, childhood and home – a kind of rootedness in place. The wild is the call to adventure, faraway places, risk-taking, challenge and growth. At certain times I feel the pull of one impulse more than the other; sometimes I’m drawn to both at once. Feijoas, I realised as the plane began its descent, represented both hearth and wild – a deeply local symbol of home, a fruit I liked to eat on the deck after kindy with my kids, and yet a plant whose story stretches across oceans. A story that started right here, in the unfamiliar landscape unfolding beneath me.

We were flying over a vast plateau of forested valleys, farmland, plantations and riverside settlements. Somewhere in those hills were feijoas, growing in their ancestral home. I looked at the bundle of typewritten pages in front of me. In 1988, thirty-one years ago – to the day! – New Zealand botanist Grant Thorp had embarked on his own feijoa mission to southern Brazil. He’d given me the report he’d prepared on his journey for New Zealand’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), which explained that the highlands in this part of South America were formed from a vast ancient lava flow. Its basalt soils were high in aluminium and acidity, and had very low natural fertility.

Feijoas, Grant wrote, appeared to be survivors – persevering and resilient even in the most adverse growing conditions. I looked up. The landscape below suddenly dropped away in a series of sharp escarpments, and I peered out of the tiny plane window with mounting excitement. Up ahead, just beyond the curving coastline, was the island city of Florianópolis – the capital of Santa Catarina, Brazil’s second-most-southern state. Its skyscrapers shone in the stormy evening light, and herons prodded the mangrove-edged mudflats as the plane crossed over the narrow ocean channel and approached the airport.

Twenty-four hours later, I’d fully embraced my traveller wild side – finding myself glitter-painted, beer-drenched and dancing enthusiastically in the middle of the road alongside Colombian feijoa researcher Juan Manuel Otálora Villamil and a group of his friends at a Carnaval street party.

My Brazilian contact, plant geneticist Rubens Nodari from the Federal University of Santa Catarina, had sent Juan – one of his doctoral students – to collect me from my accommodation on Sunday morning. Juan was in his early forties, with curly black hair and dark, mischievous eyes. We chatted in Spanish as he drove me around to Professor Nodari’s place, a comfortable, spacious house in a quiet neighbourhood, with a feijoa planted in pride of place out the front.

Nodari – no-one except his wife seemed to use his first name – has now been studying the feijoa for thirty years. At the time of my visit, he was in his sixties, clean-shaven, with short grey hair and blue eyes. I soon learned he was a bit of a joker, and a lover of fine food and wine (preferably organic). We had been corresponding by email for a few years about his team’s research, and he’d invited me on a road-trip through the feijoa’s heartland to show me what they had learned.

But first, in honour of my visit, he organised a lunchtime barbecue and invited half a dozen of his students, who were all researching aspects of the feijoa’s history, biology, genetics, evolution, domestication, management techniques and traditional uses. While they explained some of their findings, Nodari wore an apron, cooked six different kinds of meat on a special barbecue built into the wall of his garage, and brandished chicken hearts impaled on a skewer at me until I tried one. (It was chewy and gamey, but quite tasty.)

That evening, Juan offered to take me to a Carnaval party in the historic neighbourhood of Santo Antônio de Lisboa. Obviously, I said yes. Samba music blared from loudspeakers set up in the square beneath the illuminated eighteenth-century church. Thousands of revellers from all walks of life sang and drank and danced through the streets, dressed as angels, or devils, or footballers, or in drag.

We ran into a group of Juan’s friends from work; in addition to his PhD studies in feijoa genetics, he worked at a night-school for adult workers, he told me, teaching a course about the history of the spice trade that’s really about the origins of capitalism and the oppression of the working class. ‘They basically pay me to politicise the people,’ he said, passing me a can of beer.

Someone’s teenage daughter striped my cheeks with glitter and put colour in my hair, and soon Juan and I were gleefully jumping up and down with everyone else. When the floats of the samba parade finally reached us around midnight, the frenzy peaked in a whirlwind of shimmying and sequins and out-of-tune singing. The feijoa might have been embraced by New Zealand, but Brazil is where it really comes from.

Where does the feijoa come from? Asking that seemingly simple question led me down a surprising number of bifurcating pathways. There are many ways of telling the feijoa’s origin story. Botanically speaking, however, it begins somewhere near here, in this part of southeastern South America, at the very end of what scientists call the Oligocene Epoch. The deep history of this time is an ever-evolving science, and there are still many uncertainties, but new research is offering glimpses into how, where and when the feijoa might have begun.

The latest genetic analysis suggests that the feijoa diverged from its closest living relatives around 23.7 million years ago, just before the Oligocene gave way to the Miocene, and that this probably happened in southern South America.⁹ Those ancestral feijoas flowered in a world that was much warmer than ours; average global temperatures were around three to four degrees Celsius higher than in the twentieth century. The South American continent had detached itself from Antarctica and was gradually drifting northwards, but it was still an island: the isthmus of Central America didn’t yet exist. South America’s isolation led to the evolution of a wide range of unique species that would have shared the feijoa’s early world. There were primitive ground sloths, and many kinds of strange-looking hoofed herbivores with tusks and stumpy trunks. Monkeys had arrived from Africa around 13 million years earlier, having floated across the Atlantic on rafts of storm-tossed vegetation, and were evolving into distinct New World forms. And the apex predators in South American ecosystems at that time were giant ‘terror birds’.

All birds are descended from dinosaurs, but with these carnivorous, flightless hunters, the family resemblance was particularly noticeable. Around twenty species of terror bird have been identified from fossils across the continent, and in 1977 the almost-complete skeleton of Paraphysornis brasiliensis was unearthed in Brazil’s São Paulo state, just north of the feijoa’s homeland. Paraphysornis weighed up to 180 kilograms, stood 140 centimetres high at the back, and reached 240 centimetres with its head outstretched – not quite as big as the largest of the moa, but much more vicious. The South American bird’s massive beak was designed for killing: a sharp, solid meat-cleaver more than half a metre long.¹⁰

The São Paulo fossil was dated to around 23 million years ago, so it’s likely that this terror bird, or one of its relatives, was a part of the ecosystem in which the first feijoas were evolving. I like to picture fur and fruit flying as a munching mammal is snatched from under a feijoa tree by this avian monster. However, my mental picture probably isn’t quite accurate: the feijoa may have looked (and tasted) quite different back then, as its current form has been shaped over millions of years by the animals with which it shared the forest.

Researchers from Kew Gardens in London recently mapped out the feijoa’s family tree. Its Latin name is Feijoa sellowiana, and it is the only species in the genus Feijoa.¹¹ It belongs to the Myrtaceae family of plants, which includes Australian eucalyptus, European myrtles, American allspice and New Zealand pōhutukawa, a spreading coastal tree that coats itself in crimson flowers at Christmastime. Millions of years before there was a feijoa – around 40 million years ago – some of the ancestral plants of the Myrtaceae family came up with a successful new way of spreading their seeds around: juicy, delicious fruit.¹²

Botanically speaking, fruit can be fleshy – what we tend to think of as fruit – or dry, a category which includes legumes, cereal grains and nuts. Fleshy fruit has evolved many times in Earth’s history. Though our contemporary fruit bowls tend to hold just a few examples – bananas, oranges, apples – evolution has produced a tremendous variety of fruit colours, shapes, aromas and textures. It can develop on ground-hugging runners (strawberries), on palms (açai), on vines (passionfruit) and on huge forest trees (kahikatea and Brazil nuts). There are stinking durians, hairy rambutans and giant jackfruits that weigh as much as a child. In West Africa, there is even a ‘miracle fruit’ (Synsepalum dulcificum) which makes sour foods eaten afterwards taste sweet.

I wanted to know how the feijoa fruit got the way it is: egg-sized, firm green skin, small seeds, tangy taste, fragrant scent, thrown to the ground when ripe. How did it end up with the particular constellation of traits that make it so unique? I called Omer Nevo, an expert in fruit evolution at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research. Generally speaking, he told me, fruits have evolved to be attractive to animals because plants need help to spread their seeds around. ‘Plants are stuck in their place. If they released all their seeds under the mother tree, they would be in big trouble.’ The young plants would all compete with each other – and their mother – for sunlight and water, and they’d be an easy target for predators and pathogens: ‘They’ve found your entire family tree in one spot.’ To solve this problem, plants have evolved a wide range of strategies for dispersing their seeds. Some use the wind, others the water, and others wrap their seeds in a delicious, attractive package full of sugars, water, vitamins and fats, and get animals to do the work for them.

It’s not necessarily a loving relationship, Omer cautions. ‘They’re all selfish; the plants want the dispersal, and they want to invest as little as possible – and the animals want to feed on as much pulp as they can.’ Since Charles Darwin, scientists have debated whether that tug-of-war has shaped the incredible diversity of fruits we see today, or whether other factors influence fruit evolution, and animals just come along and feed on what they like. But recent studies, including some of Omer’s, have shown that there is a link. Not far from the feijoa’s native range, in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, researchers showed that palm fruits dramatically decreased in size in just a few decades after the local extinction of the large birds, like toucans, that used to feed on them.¹³

There’s also the fact that certain collections of traits tend to be observed together. Fruits that are dispersed by birds tend to be relatively small, as birds don’t have hands: they can’t pluck large fruits off a tree or rip them open with opposing fingers, as primates can. Bird-preferred fruits tend to have small seeds, too, with a hard coating that makes them more likely to survive long-distance transit inside an avian gut. Birds have good colour vision, and prefer fruits that change to a bright red, purple or pink when ripe and contrast with the leaves around them.

Mammals, on the other hand, have a well-developed sense of smell. Fruits that have evolved for distribution by mammals – particularly primates and bats – tend to be larger, with bigger seeds. Their smell often changes as they ripen, and they are more likely to turn a dull colour like yellow or brown when they mature.

What of the feijoa, then? It’s a bit of an odd case: medium-sized, with small, hard-coated seeds. And yet the fruit develops a strong fragrance when ripe, remains green, and the tree drops them on the ground when they are perfectly ready to eat. The animals involved in the dispersal of feijoas in their native environment were unknown until recently. But between 2015 and 2016, some of Nodari’s colleagues from the Federal University of Santa Catarina set up camera traps trained on twenty-eight feijoa plants at four sites in Brazil’s subtropical highlands.¹⁴

The cameras recorded twenty different species munching on the feijoa’s fruit in the autumn, including both mammals and birds. The fruits were eaten by tayra, a kind of large weasel, and coati, an adorable racoon relative with a fluffy banded tail and a long snout. Also caught on camera were cattle, small rodents, the big-eared opossum and the crab-eating fox.

Birds ate them, too. By far the most common bird disperser was the pūkeko-like Aramides saracura, the slaty-breasted wood rail, but feijoas were also enjoyed by a paintbox of bright, beautiful birds: the maroon-bellied parakeet, the rufous-bellied thrush, the dusky-legged guan and the azure jay.

Omer says that, based on the feijoa’s characteristics and what he knows about fruit evolution in general, he expects that the feijoa we have today – its size, colour, scent, firmness, nutritional content and habit of falling when ripe – is the result of millions of years of interaction with, mainly, the mammals that ate the fruits. Birds might eat them today, but the feijoa has most likely shaped its fruits to appeal to ground-dwelling mammals, he said. ‘Birds are so vision-oriented that it’s very rare that they feed on fruits that are green. Green and odorous … that sounds like a mammal-dispersed fruit, though there is always some overlap.’

To make fruit at all, a flower must be pollinated, and this dance between plant and pollinator is another important driver of evolution. The particular shape and sweet taste of the feijoa’s flowers is the result of an extremely unusual relationship with the animals that carry its bright yellow pollen from one upturned flower to the next.

One day in 1886, a five-year-old boy sat in a garden in Blumenau, Santa Catarina, his eyes pinned to a feijoa bush. His grandfather – the German settler, atheist and naturalist Fritz Müller, who was a regular correspondent of Charles Darwin – had set the boy the scientific task of observing which animals visited the flowers, their ‘dazzling white’ petals ‘rolled together like omelettes, ready for a bite’, according to the 1906 book where I found an English translation of Müller’s findings. (It also claims the feijoa petals taste like ‘orange-sugar’.)¹⁵

The diligent grandson, Hans Lorenz, apparently sat at his post for several days. Eventually, he called out: ‘Come quickly, grandfather! A black bird is eating the flowers!’¹⁶ Müller came, and watched the bird sit on an adjacent branch to devour the petals, brushing against the stigma and covering itself in powdery pollen in the process. Later, Müller saw a similar brown bird doing the same thing. These weren’t the European blackbirds that pollinate my feijoas; Müller suspected the birds were the black males and brown females of a species of Thamnophilus, a genus of birds commonly called antshrikes.

Even today, 130 years after Müller’s grandson’s observations, the exact native pollinators of the feijoa are unknown. It seems Müller was probably right: there are recent reports of Thamnophilus species eating the petals and brushing off pollen in both Brazil and Uruguay. But in Brazil, various pastel-hued species of tanagers have also been observed with feijoa pollen on their heads, while colourful toucans have been spotted visiting the flowering trees.

In New Zealand, blackbirds, mynas and silvereyes are thought to contribute to pollination. In Florida, mockingbirds and fox squirrels have been observed nibbling on the petals. In Colombia, the main pollinators are thought to be mockingbirds and the blackbird-like great thrush (Turdus fuscater) – except in urban areas. In 2022, researchers trained binoculars on twenty-two feijoa trees growing in the city of Duitama, Boyacá – a study technique basically unchanged since Müller’s day. Over sixty hours of observation, the vast majority of the animals they recorded visiting the flowers were brown rats. Just like the birds, they were nibbling on the petals, suggesting rats, too, could be acting as pollinators.¹⁷

The fact that so many different creatures can fulfil this role is one explanation for the feijoa’s global success: many other edible plants have much more specific requirements, and can be pollinated by just a handful of species that may not be found outside their home ranges. Brazil nuts, for instance, are pollinated mainly by female euglossine bees, which are big enough to get into the lidded flowers in search of nectar. Male euglossine bees visit orchid flowers instead, to gather fragrant chemicals that make them attractive to females and are crucial to mating success. This means Brazil nuts are generally collected from intact rainforest that supports both bees and orchids; they do not thrive in plantations.¹⁸

A few studies suggest pollen-seeking bees and other insects may play a role in feijoa pollination, too, though others argue they are too small to actually transfer pollen to the feijoa flower’s large spiky stigma when they land.¹⁹ Müller’s backyard study was the first-ever observation of flowers being pollinated by fruit-eating – not nectar-sucking – birds. The discovery was newsworthy enough to get a mention in a Melbourne newspaper, The Australasian, in 1886: ‘that indefatigable naturalist, Professor Fritz Müller, has just published a description of certain flowers which are habitually cross-fertilised by birds. They are the white flowers of a Brazilian tree, allied to your Australian Eugenia, known as Feijoa … The flowers are seldom visited by bees, and they contain no honey.’²⁰

Later studies confirmed that feijoa flowers have no nectar at all.²¹ The strategy of using edible petals ‘as bait’ remains extremely rare among flowering plants, only shared in South America by a handful of the feijoa’s close relatives in Acca and Myrrhinium and one other genus.²² That suggests the feijoa flowers’ particular beauty – their array of scarlet stamens, magenta stigma, and sugary white-and-crimson petals – evolved to attract frugivorous, or fruit-eating, birds.

Feijoas, then, developed relationships with the plants and animals around them, some of which, like the terror birds, have gone extinct over the intervening millions of years. The feijoas provided sweet, nutritional food in both their fruits and flowers, and in turn, fruit-loving animals helped the trees to spread across subtropical South America. The feijoa we see today is the result of this meeting between plant and pollinator, fruit and frugivore, again and again through evolutionary time.

The wild species now occupies two east–west swathes of southeast South America: one through the Brazilian states of Paraná, Santa Catarina and the north of Rio Grande do Sul, and another, genetically distinct, stretching from the south of Rio Grande do Sul into Uruguay. For years, I had longed to see those feral trees for myself, to visit the feijoa in its native forests – and now, at last, the day had arrived. The morning after the Carnaval party, tired and hungover, I waited outside my Airbnb at 6.30 am for Nodari to pick me up.