Feijoas

Feijoa is native to the cool subtropical highlands of southern Brazil, Uruguay, and parts of Paraguay and Argentina — typically found above 800 meters elevation. It was first collected in the wild in southern Brazil in 1815 by German botanist Friedrich Sellow. The genus is named after João da Silva Feijó, a Portuguese-Brazilian botanist and director of the Natural History Museum at San Sebastián, Spain, during the colonial period — not, as some assume, a New Zealand connection.

Credit for introducing feijoa into Europe goes to French botanist Edouard Andre, who distributed it after first growing it in his own garden on the French Riviera in 1890. It reached California around 1900 and New Zealand in the early 20th century, where it eventually became a genuine cultural icon far more associated with the country today than with its actual South American origin.

Nikita, one of the earliest-ripening feijoa varieties available, is a genuine exception to the New Zealand-breeding pattern — it originates from the Nikita Botanic Garden, a historic subtropical plant research institution in Crimea, Ukraine, with its own separate tradition of feijoa cultivation.

Most named feijoa cultivars grown today trace to two private New Zealand breeders, Nigel Ritson and Roy Hart, rather than any government program — feijoa breeding was once state-sponsored in New Zealand but shifted to private hands in recent decades. Ritson established an orchard of over a thousand feijoa trees on his Golden Bay property in 1991 and holds official Plant Variety Rights on four named cultivars (Takaka, Waitui, Kawatiri, Waingaro), describing his goal as a decades-long pursuit of a feijoa that is large, abundant, disease-resistant, delicious, and stores well.

Feijoa is a member of the myrtle family (Myrtaceae), the same family as guava, clove, and eucalyptus — not actually related to true guavas despite the common alternate name "pineapple guava."