With its furry, light brown skin, bright green flesh speckled with tiny black seeds, and a tropical flavour reminiscent of a mix of strawberries and bananas, the kiwi fruit has moved on from being a rare exotic to a staple fruit on the supermarket shelves. Packed full of vital oxidants, containing almost twice as much vitamin C as an orange and rich in vitamins K and E, it is a fruit for these health conscious times. It is also very versatile, equally tasty when eaten raw, blended into a smoothie, or, taking a leaf out of the Chinese culinary book, as a jam.
There are between forty and sixty species of Actinidia, to give the kiwi fruit its taxonomical generic name, of which A. deliciosa, a separate species since the 1980s, is the most likely to be found in shops. Growing equally as well in the northern and southern hemispheres, the production of kiwi fruit is now big business with a global market estimated to be worth USD 1.89 billion in 2024.
Less than a century ago, though, it was virtually known, at least in the west, its rise in fortune, one of commercial agriculture’s greatest success stories of recent decades, due to a mix of luck, perseverance, and marketing acumen.
Despite its name, the kiwi fruit is indigenous to the temperate forests of the mountains and hills of southwest China, where it was prized for its medicinal properties. The fruit, known as Yang tao, meaning sunny peach, was first mentioned in writing during the Song dynasty in the 12th century, and was collected from the wild rather than cultivated. By the time Li Shizhen produced his compendium of medicine, natural history, and Chinese herbology, Bencao Gangmu, in 1597, it was known as Mihou tao, macaque fruit, because of the monkeys’ predilection for it.
The first specimens of A. chinensis reached Europe in the 1750s, thanks to a Jesuit missionary, Father Pierre Le Chéron d’Incarville. When a plant hunter, Robert Fortune, was sent by the Horticultural Society of London to China between 1843 and 1845 “to collect seeds and plants of an ornamental or useful kind”, he also sent a specimen home, which was held at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. It was not until 1886, though, that the first fruits of A. chinensis were even seen in Europe, Kew receiving specimens preserved in spirit. Instead, the plants and seeds were regarded as ornamental curiosities rather than the source of a delicious, edible fruit, not least because early attempts to produce fruit under cultivation were rather hit or miss affairs.
The seeds of A. chinensis which plant collector, E H Wilson, sent from Hupeh in 1900 to one of England’s principal nurseries, James Veitch & Sons Ltd, germinated but, frustratingly, only produced male plants, thus thwarting any plans to grow the plants and fruit commercially. Seeds sent in 1904 by Consul-General Wilcox from Hankow to the United States Department of Agriculture seeds fared better, the resulting vines bearing fruit at the Plant Introduction Field Station at Chico in California by 1910, but their commercial potential was not realized.
Where England had failed and the United States had missed an opportunity, New Zealand was poised to make hay. Missionary and principal of a New Zealand girls’ school, Mary Isabel Fraser, collected some A. chinensis seeds from plants she had come across at a Church of Scotland mission in Yichang and sent them to a Whanganui farmer, Alexander Allison. He planted them and by 1910 the resultant vines had borne their first fruits.
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