The man who gave us feijoa (and kiwifruit)

​Do you love the perfumed sweet feijoa or does the smell make you gag?
How many remember the heavy fruit laden trees in everyone’s backyards? Or that it was sometimes called the fruit salad tree?
Because without Hayward Wright we would be missing many of the yummy fruit we love so much, in particular, kiwifruit and feijoa.
Wright’s contribution to New Zealand has been immeasurable.
It was at his nursery in Avondale, Auckland that many of the fruits were tried for the first time before being made available to the public.
Wright was known as a grumpy man, but he was a horticultural genius.
Kiwifruit had come into the country as early as 1904 and were known as Chinese gooseberries. The first seeds were brought in by Whanganui Girls College head Isabel Fraser who gave the seeds to a farmer, Alexander Allison who grew it here for the first time.
They began to increase in popularity but it wasn’t until Wright began experimenting that a stable solid vine with large fruit was developed for commercial use. It ended up becoming one of our biggest export earners.
In the 1920’s, Wright began working with feijoa. It goes by quite a few other names including pineapple guava but feijoa is the correct one.
The fruit had first been discovered in 1815 by German explorer Freidrich Sellow. But it was many years later in 1890 that it was taken to Europe and named after Brazilian botanist Joam de Silva Feijo.
Wright began advertising the plants through his catalogue. “Its fruit… is destined to become one of the very best for jams or jellies. It has a flavour quite its own, which can only be described as delicious.”
Most of us know it now because of heavily fruit laden trees in backyards, yielding up its crop in late summer and early autumn.
Hayward Reginald Wright had been born on November 25, 1873 in Northland to Ernest Edward Hamilton Wright and his wife Sarah.
He came to Avondale about 1900 and ran a nursery there until his retirement in the 1940’s when he went to Tauranga.
He was considered the foremost citrus nurseryman in New Zealand and helped establish many different kinds of lemons, mandarins, clementines, orange and grapefruit along with cherries.
Wright died on July 14, 1959 and is buried in the Anglican Cemetery in Tauranga.