The Koanga Institute Collection is a collection of ‘things’ - endangered heritage vegetable and flower seeds and plant material, and endangered heritage fruit trees. We also include in our collection a collection of appropriate technology such as grey water systems and light earth building techniques. We have either collected the seeds and plants to save them from extinction because we see their significance in our cultural evolution. We have created or saved the technology that we see as vital, as we actively work to bring back a more sustainable way of living.

Our collection of seeds and perrenial vegetables can be seen in our store - Members of the Institute have access to all the seeds, however there is a range of 92 seed lines that is available to the general public. Click here to browse the vegetables, or here to browse the flowers. The Koanga Gardens range is also available from selected retailers in NZ.

Koanga Institute Fruit Tree Collection

Our collection of  New Zealand heritage food plants, our cultural ‘Toanga’ has been growing for over 29 years now, and it began with the fruit trees.

Kay Baxter writes about the Institute collection that she started more than 25 years ago.

The family ‘dog kennel’ peach later named the ‘River’ peach (because it was the same as the old white fleshed peaches that used to grow wild all around the shores of the Kaipara Harbour …and up the arm of the harbour where we lived it was called the Otamatea River) was the beginning of the collection.

That first peach tree, that sent me off on a long journey is still alive, perhaps the tree will last longer than the dog kennels. It was so good because it had reliable heavy crops of excellent tasting peaches every year with no inputs other than the ‘dog manure’! unlike the peach trees that we bought from garden centres, which in Northland,  just do not generally perform well at all.

The journey has been an amazing one, I’ve learned loads about the fruit trees that came to this land with our own ancestors, how they were grown and selected for taste, disease resistance in the various Bioregions of NZ and passed around from family to family to friend just as the vegetables and flowers were. I saw how they had been through a natural process of 150 years in Northland, of adaption to the Northern bioregion and also a process of 150 years of human selection for the Northern conditions. I also saw how those qualities of natural and human selection were not valued by the world of horticulture that was by the 1980’s mainstream.  I came to understand how after the second world war as a nation we chose to have a higher standard of living and so we wanted to earn more export dollars to pay for it so we all went to work to pay for the car and the carpet and automatic washing machine, leaving our gardens and seed selection and fruit tree heirlooms to the multinationals to take care of … ( for more see the stories here)

I’m sure we did not understand the implications of those choices and so by the 1990's i realised that we had already lost over 90% of our heritage vegetables that had been in catalogues 100 years before and most of our fruit trees too. I saw how the fruit trees in the garden centres were the same trees as those being grown for  commercial orchards; it is cheaper for the nursery men to sell the same lines to garden centres and in the supermarkets we get the second grade fruit from the same export lines which were no longer being bred to nourish us or grow well in our own bio regions but to last a long time in the hold of a ship, and sell well to the wealthy folk in the Northern hemisphere, who buy on looks…

I saw the old varieties that had the best tasting fruit, that actually fruited reliably in Northern NZ and were disease resistant and easy to grow; these were disappearing and we set out to save them. In more recent years we have seen the science coming through which confirms the feelings we had all along about the fruit from the old trees having far higher levels of nutritional value than modern varieties. As time goes by I find more and more reasons why these heritage trees are such a vital part of our heritage and understand even better just where my ‘feeling’ they were a ‘vital link’ came from. Recent science coming through the study of epigenetics tells us that environment determines genetic expression, through the quality of the communication between  our food and our DNA mainly. The more nutrient dense our food is, the healthier we will be. There is far more measurable nutrition in a heritage apple than any modern apple, and it just goes on and on.

 After 30 odd years we hold a large collection of fruit trees particularly adapted to Northern conditions including many apples, pears, peaches, plums, apricots etc.

A range of the best of these trees is  available to the general public as Koanga Gardens fruit trees from either Edible Garden who mail order them around NZ, from Kaiwaka Organics where you must pick them up. If you would like to propagate your own fruit trees from our ‘collection’, Institute members can access our scion wood, cuttings and rootstocks catalogue and order plant material.

Our main fruit tree collection is a Northern Bioregional collection, and we know these trees grow and fruit very well in the North where winters are warm and the climate is often very wet and humid. We also know that most of these trees also travel and perform well all over NZ. Interestingly fruit trees travel South fare better than they do going North. I realise now that that is because the more winter chill they get, the better they fruit. The ones that fruit well in Northland have naturalized in that warm winter area where there is very little ‘low chill’.
If you take a fruit tree from Hamilton even if it has the same name as a fruit tree you know from the Koanga ‘Collection’ that fruits well in the north, such as Goldmine nectarine, they will most likely hardly fruit at all. They are significantly different because they have not adapted to our warm northern winters.

Gail Aiken who lives in the Hokianga takes care of our Northern Bioregional fruit tree collection and you can contact her on gail@koanga.org.nz. She would love to hear from you if you live on the Coromandel, warm areas of the Bay of Plenty and North of the Bombay hills and you have a special old tree you think needs saving. If you live further South and you have a fruit tree that needs saving or a tree that is very special for some reason or another we’d still love to hear from you. In this case please email info@koanga.org.nz.

Around 10 years after we began collecting the fruit trees, our attention was drawn to the plight of our vegetable seeds which were in an even more precarious position. The FAO (food and agriculture organisation, in the UN) said, in the 1980’s that we had lost 90% of our seeds and were still loseing them at a rate of 3% per year. 

I realised who it was that held the old seeds, and of course it was the old gardeners.  They were not just lying around on old housesites very often although a few were.. I began collecting those too. Over 20 years our collection has grown to around 700 lines of seed. These are mostly our own NZ heritage seeds, treasured and kept alive to today by our very own ancestors who valued them for the nutrition they held for us and for their ability to grow well in our own environment.

We believe there are no other seeds in the world who are able to nourish us as well as these seeds, and there is nobody else in the world who is likely to be as motivated as NZ gardeners to save these seeds…. we are doing it…once again we began this collection with a ‘knowing’ that they were Taonga that needed saving. Their ability to nourish us in ways agribusiness seeds are unable to is clear, but as time has gone by the science is catching up with our internal individual knowing and is confirming the value of our heritage seeds and all heritage food plants.

Some of the most precious of our heritage food plants are not propagated by seed but by vegetative parts like roots, potatoes and bulbs and suckers etc. All of these lines are available through our back order system. Where numbers are still extremely limited to members only. A few will be available to the general public once we build amounts of plant material up.

These vegetable, flower and herb seeds are available to you today either through the Koanga Gardens range on our website or a range of shops around NZ, or a wide range of the more endangered varieties by becoming a member of the Koanga Institute.