Heritage Trees And Their Lasting Legacy
The Koanga journey traces back more than 40 years, with its roots firmly planted in Kaiwaka.
Coinciding with her move to Kaiwaka in the 1980s Kay Baxter joined New Zealand’s first Permaculture Design Course. She arrived in the region with a strong desire to be self- reliant in food but quickly realised that very few people were gardening - especially growing fruit trees - in the area at that time. When speaking with locals, she often heard the same response: “The fruit trees from garden centres don’t fruit well up here on heavy clay and with relatively warm winters.”
However, wild fruit trees were thriving in abundance around the Kaipara on roadsides and in old abandoned homesteads, which led Kay to begin collecting them. At first, she didn’t fully grasp why these trees were flourishing, but over time, it became clear - they had been adapting to the region’s warm winters and heavy clay soil for up to 200 years. Peaches, for example, were known to have been cultivated in large orchards in the area as early as the 1800s and had since naturalised to the local conditions, unlike trees grown in garden centres and sent north.
As her collection grew, Kay had the foresight to document the histories, stories, and cultural significance of many of these trees. Over the years, scientific research has validated what her own taste buds had already confirmed - heritage fruit trees produce fruit with significantly higher nutrient levels than their industrially grown counterparts, with apples averaging up to eight times the nourishment.
“If we choose to feed our families nourishing food, then heritage is critical,” Kay explains. Heritage food plants, both vegetables and seeds, have a unique ability to interact with the earth and sky through microbial networks - something that highly bred modern seeds and trees are less able to do. This process allows trees to collect and transmit essential information from their ecosystem, aligning them with the land where they grow. In turn, consuming food from these trees helps align human bodies to their local environment via the microbes in the human gut. This phenomenon has been supported by modern research in epigenetics.
“Our much-loved Kaipara gifted us a wonderful beginning to this journey, which continues today,” Kay reflects. “It has provided the foundation for what is possibly the most resilient collection of fruit trees available to home gardeners in the face of climate change in this land.” She and her family remain deeply grateful for the remarkable people they met and the beautiful places they encountered, all of which contributed to bringing this gift to the nation.
Kōanga’s trees, available online, are organically and biologically grown, with magnetic north marked on their trunks to assist with optimal replanting.