Category: Feijoa Facts

Why doesn’t California have a feijoa industry like New Zealand’s? 

Of all the exotic plants in Dr. Francesco Franceschi’s Santa Barbara gardens, few inspired as much excitement as the feijoa. Little more than a decade after Dr. Franceschi received his first seeds from France, the feijoa was hailed as a “wonder fruit” that would “soon be one of the most popular sugar fruits in the United States.”¹ In 1914, the Santa Ana Register gushed, “Without question the Feijoa, under California methods of propagation, selection and culture, will reach a great state of perfection”.² Advertisements claimed it was the most popular new fruit since the avocado.³ In 1915, the price of feijoa seeds skyrocketed to $6 a gram⁴, the equivalent of $145 today for a small seed packet. Newspapers enthusiastically reported on plantings in Santa Monica,⁵ Escondido,⁶ and Butte County⁷ (near Sacramento).

Many California nurserymen (they were all men) championed the feijoa in the early part of the century. Prominent names include Douglas William (D.W.) Coolidge of the Rare Plant Gardens in Pasadena, who introduced the “Coolidge” variety; William Boyes of Lomita, who developed the “Choiceana”; Charles Parkman (C.P.) Taft of Orange County, also known as the father of the California avocado industry; and the famous botanist Luther Burbank, who had an experimental farm in Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco. Dr. Frederick Wilson Popenoe, an expert in Latin American horticulture, wrote glowingly that “few plants can offer such an appeal to public favor.”⁸ The State of California predicted that the feijoa would be a “complete success”.⁹

But the feijoa boom soon went bust. Growers discovered that the size of the fruit varied greatly, and many trees bloomed profusely but did not fruit at all.¹⁰ In 1919, the respected nurseryman George Christian Roeding (owner of the California Nursery Company in Niles) wrote that the feijoa was “Another of our semi-tropical fruits which was boomed to the limit by over-zealous nurserymen without testing out its value fully. This fruit is simply another example of having its value extolled before determining some of the salient facts concerning it. It was widely distributed, and although it blossomed profusely the bushes failed in most instances to set fruit, and in consequence of this it lost its popularity.” Roeding did have high praise for the feijoa’s “mingling of flavors” and he predicted it would be “planted again on a limited scale.” He noted that “varieties are now being introduced that have fruit twice the size of a hen’s egg, and are known to fruit regularly and abundantly.” He thought the feijoa “should have a place in every garden.”¹¹

In 1924, the Los Angeles Times ran a long article by Knowles Ryerson, a young horticulturalist with the state’s Agricultural Extension Service. Mr. Ryerson later became an eminent professor and eventually dean of agriculture at the University of California, Berkeley. Ryerson was not bullish about the feijoa’s commercial prospects. “Great things have been expected of the feijoa”, he wrote, but most of the plantings made in the previous decade “have been abandoned at the present time.” He identified “several reasons why commercial plantings have failed to prove very profitable.” First, “the feijoa is a new fruit, unknown to the trade and to consuming public alike. It has to compete with many other fruits.” Unfortunately, “most of the fruit offered for sale has come from seedling trees and has no uniformity in size, shape, color, flavor or quality.” The fruit itself “is not very attractive” and the “buying public is not too prone to try new things, which are not particularly attractive, especially when the price is rather high.” Mr. Ryerson predicted that the feijoa would remain “a home garden fruit” for the foreseeable future.¹²

Ryerson was right. By 1934, the Los Angeles Times described the feijoa as a “desirable hedge plant” that was “ideal for home planting”, with only “limited commercial possibilities”.¹³ Over the next five decades, the feijoa received regular attention in California newspapers, gardening books and magazines, but only as an ornamental shrub with a pleasant-tasting fruit that made a nice jelly.

People still raved about the feijoa—or not. According to a San Bernardino newspaper in 1950, “Many people do not like the [feijoa] until they have acquired a taste for it.”¹⁴ One’s opinion might depend on the local climate, which is a challenging thing about the feijoa. Feijoa trees are hardy, and they grow well in many environments where their fruit is mediocre. Gardeners in the San Francisco Bay Area discovered that feijoas tasted best on the cool and foggy coast, rather than the hot and sunny valleys.¹⁵ San Bernardino is on the edge of the Mojave desert, where delicate feijoa fruit bakes in the heat, especially if it’s a variety that ripens early.

In 1954, the Los Angeles Times reported that a Norwegian farmer named Oluf Dahlfe was growing feijoas on his Central Valley ranch in Tulare County south of Fresno. Mr. Dahlfe thought his “guavas” could become a million-dollar industry. However, when he tried to sell them to stores and hotels, he had to give them away on a sampling basis.¹⁶

Meanwhile in New Zealand, feijoas were flourishing. The earliest feijoas in New Zealand were California varieties, including the Coolidge, Choiceana, and Superba. As in California, they were mostly used as landscape plants, appreciated more for their attractive foliage and flowers than for their fruit. An Aukland nurseryman, Hayward Wright, took a liking to the feijoa and spent decades importing and selectively breeding trees for improved fruit quality, hardiness and good storage characteristics. By the 1980s, New Zealand had a profitable feijoa industry built on Hayward Wright’s cultivars such as the Mammoth and the Apollo.

The feijoa’s success in New Zealand inspired renewed interest from California fruit growers in the 1980s. At its peak, the Feijoa Growers of California had some eighty members working hard to develop a wider market for the feijoa.^{17, 18} Unfortunately, these efforts relied on commercial feijoas from New Zealand, rather than the improved local varieties which nurserymen like Frank Serpa and Alexander Nazemetz had quietly adapted to California’s microclimates. The New Zealand feijoas did poorly when they were planted in California’s San Joaquin Valley.¹⁹ Although feijoa trees can grow vigorously in hot, sunny weather, the fruit is highly sensitive to heat. Daytime high temperatures around Modesto often exceed 100°F (38°C) in the summer and the humidity can dip into single digits. By contrast, summer days on New Zealand’s North Island are usually in the 70’s (21-27°C) and humid. By 2011, there were only 10 small feijoa growers still active in California.²⁰

The feijoa is still a popular fruit for backyard gardeners in California, but it seems unlikely that there will be any major effort to develop it as a commercial crop for the foreseeable future. The problems that Knowles Ryerson identified in 1924 have not been completely solved. Although California feijoas are larger and more flavorful than ever, the fruits from individual trees are still highly variable.²¹ Commercial growers need trees that reliably produce fruit of consistent size, appearance and quality; otherwise consumers won’t buy them. But fruit trees in their wild state have no incentive to be consistent. Fruit has only one purpose for a tree: to attract birds and animals to disperse its seeds. The tree doesn’t know what sorts of critters may be around on a given day, so it makes sense to provide a variety of choices. Also, it takes energy for the tree to grow fruit and sweeten it with sugar. Large, sugary fruit is wasteful. If smaller, blander fruit will do the job just as well, that’s good enough for the tree.

These tendencies have to be completely bred out of the tree to make it a commercial success, which takes many generations of selection. On top of that, feijoas evolved in subtropical forests where it rains almost daily. Although they’re drought tolerant, they need supplemental watering to produce good fruit in California, where we are chronically plagued by drought. Access to water is an obstacle for new growers, and existing growers are unlikely to risk their water allocation on a speculative market for feijoas, when they can make a guaranteed profit on peaches or almonds.

In the end, maybe it’s not so bad if California agribusiness ignores the feijoa. After all, this is the business that gave us supermarket bins filled with eye-catching but tasteless peaches, and plump, red tomatoes that are pink and flavorless on the inside. Fruit that ships and sells well does not necessarily taste so great. So I think I’ll happily enjoy the wild flavor and unpredictable charms of homegrown feijoas for many years to come.

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(1) Prof. J.L. Stahl, “The Feijoa in California“, The Ranch (Seattle, WA), 15 Dec. 1913, pages 6-7. 

(2) Reginald Brinsmead, “A Promising New Fruit for Southern California“, Santa Ana Register, 21 Apr. 1914, page 4. 

(3) Armstrong Nurseries advertisement, “Plant Feijoas“, Los Angeles Times, 24 Jan. 1915, Part II, page 10. 

(4) “New Fruit for This Country“, Los Angeles Times, 26 Sept. 1915, Part II, page 8. 

(5) Ibid. 

(6) “Feijoa Sellowianas Bloom at Escondido“, Santa Ana Register, 28 May 1914, page 1. 

(7) “Rare Fruit Grown in Butte County“, San Francisco Call, 13 July 1912, page 23. 

(8) F.W. Popenoe, “Feijoa Sellowiana: Its History, Culture and Varieties“, Pomona College Journal of Economic Botany, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Feb. 1912), p. 217. 

(9) California State Commission of Horticulture, Monthly Bulletin, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Jan. 1916), pages 22-23. 

(10) Walter Ficklin, “Information Wanted About the Feijoa“, California Cultivator, Dec. 19, 1914. 

(11) George C. Roeding, Roeding’s Fruit Grower’s Guide (Fresno, Calif., 1919), page 76. 

(12) Knowles Ryerson, “That Popular Fruiting Ornamental, the Feijoa“, Los Angeles Times, 6 Apr. 1924, Farm and Tractor Section. 

(13) W.H. Williams, “The Feijoa’s Ideal for Home Planting“, Los Angeles Times, 11 Nov. 1934, Southland Home and Garden Section, page 7. 

(14) Andrew McCornack, “Feijoa Deserves More Use as Garden Shrub“, San Bernardino County Sun, 1 Jan. 1950, Home-Garden Section. 

(15) Iva Newman, “Ornamental Trees with Tasty Fruits,” The Times (San Mateo, California), 15 Mar. 1968, page 14. 

(16) “Exeter Rancher Claims Guava Growing Can Become a Million Dollar Industry,” Los Angeles Times, 14 June 1954, Part III, page 7. The article refers to “guavas” but is clearly describing the feijoa because it says that the fruit drops off the tree when ripe and the grower “just makes daily tours of the trees, picking up the fallen fruit.” True guavas do not fall off the tree and are usually picked green. 

(17) Stephen Ferris, “New Zealand Feijoa May Take Limelight from Kiwi Fruit“, Santa Cruz Sentinel, Nov. 4, 1987, page D1. 

(18) Judith Sims, “Beyond the Kiwi: Small Farmers Cash In On California’s Appetite for Nouvelle Produce“, Los Angeles Times Magazine, July 16, 1989. 

(19) Robert Chambers, “CRFG Cofounder Paul Thompson: Pioneer Rare Fruit Grower“, Fruit Gardener, March-Apr. 2008, page 21. 

(20) Elhadi M. Yahia, Postharvest Biology and Technology of Tropical and Subtropical Fruits (Woodhead Pub., 2011), page 118. 

(21) Presentation by Mark Albert at a meeting of the California Rare Fruit Growers of Santa Clara County on Dec. 9, 2017.

For over 50 years, the Edenvale Nursery was a fixture on Mission Boulevard in Fremont, California. When the nursery was founded in 1922, it was surrounded by a bucolic landscape of orchards and farms nestled against the hills on the southeastern side of San Francisco Bay. The community grew up along the old mission road, formerly a Native American trail, that led from the Spanish settlements in the East Bay to Mission San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley (once known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight—now Silicon Valley).

Frank Serpa bought the nursery in 1946. He had a love of gardening from his childhood in the Azores and became an expert horticulturist, constantly working on new varieties of plants and trees for the Bay Area’s growing neighborhoods. One of his notable successes was the Edenvale Improved Coolidge Feijoa, which had a better flavor than the original Coolidge and thrived on California’s foggy coast. Frank reportedly discovered or grew this tasty feijoa in Santa Cruz, although the nursery itself was in Fremont. He also developed the Edenvale Supreme and Edenvale Late varieties. Frank’s feijoas were planted all over California.

Eventually Fremont’s suburban growth overtook the nursery. Frank sold the land to a housing developer in 1974. The nursery operated briefly at a new location until closing for good in 1976. The hillsides along Mission Boulevard were turned into luxury tract homes; some of them, perhaps, with a feijoa in the yard.

The Argus, Fremont, California
Sunday, October 24, 1971

Nurseryman waits for 50 years

By Gary Tischler

FREMONT—Once, when Frank J. Serpa was a very young boy in the Azores, a young priest got him interested in plants and green things.

Like a young man smitten for the first time, Serpa never got over it. That fascination in watching and making living things grow out of the earth never left him. Someday he would have his own nursery.

Sometimes, someday is a long time away. Sometimes, you have to wait.

Serpa waited, never losing his first love, waited through half a turbulent century, two world wars, a depression and, in his own immediate sphere, years spent sweating and surviving, working in one hard job after another, as a machinist, a construction worker, an engineer. All the way through 1946.

Until finally, he and his wife had that nest egg to begin making things grow.

“I had to wait a long time to do the one thing I always wanted to do,” Serpa said.

It is maybe one of the few regrets he has in his life, that time not doing it.

Ever since he took over Edenvale Nursery at 40160 Mission Blvd., he has made up for lost time. Now 70, he was recently named the 1971 winner of the Pacific Coast Nurseryman Award, given annually to a nurseryman who has made outstanding contributions to horticulture and the nursery industry.

If you know nothing about the various plants in his nursery other than that they’re green and look and smell nice and fresh, a guided tour of the Edenvale Nursery will probably mean thing in technical terms. It is maybe enough, however even if you don’t know the difference between a gladiola and a cactus, to know that Christmas trees have always been green.

Frank Serpa riding through the green alleys of thistles and exotic leaves, surrounded by the smell of watered earth and the sigh of leaves anticipating changing color, is a man at home. The gardens and mounds of the nursery are his castle, this place where all things grow.

To that end, in one way or another, he busies and fills all the time of life with a multitude of activities. Such as: member of the Pacific Coast Nurseryman Association; member of the International Plant Propagator’s Society and its board of directors; member of the Master Nurseryman’s Association, the Palm Society, and the California Horticultural Society.

He has been instrumental in the Niles Rotary Club’s donation of 200 flowering trees to be planted in Central Park. The club has participated in numerous schoolground plantings in Fremont in commeration of Arbor Day and Conservation Week. He is also a boy scout merit badge counselor and a director of the Fremont Boys Club, is on the Washington High School Ornamental Horticulture advisory board and teaches a gardening class at Ohlone College. He also supports Fremont’s Project Douglas, which  advocates the use of living Christmas trees. In addition, he sponsors Little League and softball teams and offers scholarships to students interested in ornamental horticulture.

It is a busy and varied life. To get there was also a busy and hard job. It took years.

When he was 18, he came to San Leandro.

“Even then, I was growing things,” he said in a quiet voice. “Once, we had a large yard and I was in my glory. I was always fooling around with plants. It was fantastic.”

But there was hard work. He worked for the Caterpillar Tractor Co., he became a full-fledged machinist, he worked on ferry boats in the San Francisco Bay, he became a mechanic. He even flew airplanes in Howard Hughes’ film “Hell’s Angels” at the Oakland Airport.

“He impressed me. He was an amazing man,” Serpa said of Hughes. “He was an amazingly intelligent man, but he seemed to be always thinking, five, ten different things going on at the same time.”

So much for Hughes. The war, the second one, brought Serpa his nest egg, working sometimes as much as 35 hours in a row. He bought the nursery.

Talking about growing things, Serpa sounds a little like an artist. He creates plants, makes new ones out of cross-planting. He has come up with a number of new, never-known-of plants brought back from the Azores.

He may be way ahead of young people in ecology, in the nature-is-best trip. He has always thought so, believed it passionately.

“They’ve got something there,” he said. “This ecology, you know, green things and nature being good, they’ve done a lot.”

He is interested in youth who are, after all, a growing species, and tries to steer them toward plants and gardening.

“Every now and then you find one,” he said. “Lots more are getting interested. I try to help.”

Meanwhile, the plants continue to grow in his years-coming garden.

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CURTIS’S BOTANICAL MAGAZINE
Comprising the
Plants of the Royal Gardens of Kew
and
of Other Botanical Establishments in Great Britain;
with Suitable Descriptions;
by
SIR JOSEPH DALTON HOOKER, M.D., C.B., G.C.S.I.,
F.R.S., F.L.S.,
etc.

Flowering, and subsequently fruiting specimens of this interesting plant were sent to me in 1896, by my friend M. André, from his Garden, Villa Columbia, Golfe S. Juan, as a species of Psidium? from Uruguay, with an eatable fruit, accompanied with the request that I would determine its name. This, owing to an important error in the description of Feijoa in Martiu’s “Flora Brasilienses,” proved to be a very troublesome task, and it was not until I undertook a systematic inspection of the whole vast tribe of Myrtae in the Kew Herbarium that I was able to give M. André the name, under which he published it in the “Rev. Horticol.” cited above. The error alluded to was describing the seed as albuminous, with flat, foliaceous cotyledons, characters foreign to Order Myrtaceae.

With the habit of Psidium, Feijoa differs from that genus in the elongated ovary, in the filaments erect in bud (which differs from all other Myrtaceae), and in the hairy anthers.

Feijoa was discovered by the late Fr. Sellow of Potsdam, who, in 1819, accompanied Prince Neuwied in his journey to Brasil as a plant collector, on the recommendation of Sir Joseph Banks and Mr. Lambert. After his return Sellow’s collections were widely distributed, and there is a good set of them in the Kew Herbarium, including Feijoa, which was found in the Cocos australis region, of the district of Rio Grande do Sol. Since that period wild and cultivated specimens have been sent by various Brasilian collectors. Specimens communicated by Glaziou from the Rio Botanical Gardens are numbered 6156, 7886.

The name Feijoa was given in compliment to Don J. da Silva Feijo, Director of the National History Museum of San Sebastian. Over and above the beauty of the foliage and flower of the plant, it is remarkable for the rich aromatic odour and flavour of its guava-like fruit.

Descr.—An erect shrub or small tree, with brown bark, and leaves clothed beneath with snow-white appressed tomentum. Leaves two to three inches long, opposite, shortly petioled, oblong, obtuse, smooth, deep green and shining above. Flowers solitary, axillary, stoutly pedicelled, drooping, about two inches broad across the petals. Calyx white-tomentose, tube elongate, sub-clavate, bibracteolate at the base, not produced beyond the ovary, lobes orbicular, reflexed. Petals orbicular, spreading, externally white-tomentose, internally blood-red, with white margins. Stamens very many, filaments erect in bud, at length spreading, longer than the petals, blood-red, anthers small, yellow, pubescent. Ovary four-celled, cells many-ovuled; style stout, narrowed below the capitellate stigma. Berry two inches long, by one and three-quarters in diameter, oblong, crowned with the calyx-lobes, many-seeded, pericarp thin, green, sarcocarp fleshy, aromatic. Seeds reniformly orbicular, compressed, testa coriaceous. Embryo spirally coiled.—J.D.H.

Fig. 1, Bud with perianth removed on one side, showing the erect stamens and style; 2 and 3, anthers; 4, calyx-tube and style; 5 and 6, transverse sections of ovary at different stages of development; 7, ripe fruit; 8, seed; 9, embryo:—all enlarged, except 7 and 8, which are of nat. size.

October 1, 1898