Science writer Kate Evans sometimes thinks she is "just a weirdo with an inane sense of interesting and sometimes too tangential".
It took the science journalist 10 years to write her first and thus far only book, Feijoa — A Story of Obsession and Belonging.
She started when she was 30, she’s now 40 and when Feijoa was published in March, it rapidly became a non-fiction best seller.
Speaking to the Wanaka Sun last week, shortly after getting home from a trip France, the jetlagged author declared she had forgotten how to type and could not remember what Feijoa was about.
"This is good because I need to talk about it when I come to Queenstown in a couple of weeks," she said, with a laugh.
Feijoa tells the story of how a fragrant green fruit expanded its horizons around the world before putting down roots in New Zealand in the early 1900s.
To satisfy her curiosity for the strangely-named juicy fruit, Evans wove together strands of evolution, biology, geography, the history of colonialism, and even neuroscience (asking herself why does the smell of feijoa make her yearn for home?).
The feijoa’s first indigenous name is not known but its ancient origins are in South America.
It was named feijoa sellowiana after 19th century scientists Friedrich Sellow, of Germany, and Joao da Silva Feijo, of Brazil.
In North America, the feijoa defied attempts at commercial cropping. In New Zealand it found a happy home in many gardens but in many places it still seems to languish, semi-forgotten.
During a search for one of France’s oldest feijoa trees in 2019, Evans met Carolyn Hanbury, who set Evans down a tangential path to meet Argentinian chef and feijoa fan Mauro Colagreco at a nearby Michelin three-star restaurant where it cost 450 euros (about NZ$800) to eat (she didn’t).
"We got this amazing backstage tour where we got to see all the chefs working and we met the young Argentinian chef. And we got to try this amazing bread and we saw the feijoa in their little garden and I found out that [Mauro Colagreco’s sister] Laura actually has indigenous Uruguayan ancestry, Charrua ancestry ... So there was just this beautiful synergy," she said.
Evans devotes a chapter to the story of the nomadic Charrua people, who were said to have become extinct in the 1800s, as a result of genocide.
The Charrua people, their history and their language did in fact disappear — until very recently.
Evans writes: "In Uruguay today, there is a dual re-emergence and rediscovery, both of the Charrua themselves, and alongside them, the feijoa."
A complicated fish and feijoa recipe contributed by Mirazur chefs Laura Colagreco, Milton Fragozo and others, is one of many recipes in her book.
Evans’ own obsession with feijoa is tangled up with her sense of being a Kiwi.
She travelled a lot in her 20s and the taste and smell of feijoa always reminded her of home.
Back in New Zealand, she decided to write about them but things progressed fairly slowly while she and her husband raised their children and did other things.
Evans attempted each year to pitch her story to publishers, without success.
A turning point came in 2018, when she won funding from Creative New Zealand and the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship, helping her to visit Brazil, Colombia, the South of France, Germany and the United States in 2019.
"That was when I was like, OK, it’s definitely happening, but I still didn’t have a publisher."
Many were interested but ultimately said no because nobody knew what a feijoa was in every other country but New Zealand, she said.
Then Mao Press publisher Kate Stevenson appeared and said yes.
"They encouraged me to put more personal things in there and in the end, yes, I think I’m much prouder of it. And it’s much more of a reflection of me," Evans said.
Evans loves feijoas as much as she ever did but now they are more riddled with meaning.
"It’s really no longer just a tree for me. Like, I look at it and I think of all of these adventures that I went on and all these people that I was able to meet and all this history. And then it just became part of my identity — the mad Feijoa Lady of Raglan my publisher, my New Zealand Geographic publisher called me ... One of the things I loved about this was like that every tiny thing can have a huge story, if you look close enough."
