Northland farmer Hugh Rose enjoys telling the story of how he got his wife Pauline involved in his passion for growing exotic plants and tropical fruit.

The competitive gift giver once bought her lotus seeds
for her birthday, which he admits was a “pretty cute trick”.

“She had no idea poor girl.

“Luckily, I gave her instructions as well.

“Growing lotus from seed is extremely complex but they are a beautiful flower and plant.”

While lotus seeds are an aquatic plant, they thrive in warmer temperatures and tropical climates, making them ideal for growing in Northland.

Rose holds the versatile lotus in high esteem; not only are they aesthetically pleasing, but the roots and leaves are also edible.

While he grows mainly bananas at his tropical paradise called Land of the Lotus in Maungatapere, 15 minutes from Whangārei, he also has a “good collection” of lotus plants which he sells to collectors all over the country.

“They’re popular with Asians and Indians and people with large ponds,” he said.

“The seeds taste like peanuts, and the seedpods can be used in stir-fries.

“The other nice thing is that they sterilise mosquitoes. They put an enzyme into the water that sterilises them. They’re a multipurpose plant.”

Rose has more than 40 banana varieties growing on his 25-hectare property.

He also grows pineapple, pawpaw, papaya, and babaco (also known as champagne fruit), along with capuli cherries, dragon fruit, sugar cane, mangos, lychee, Japanese raisins, and the jaboticaba, or Brazilian grape tree.

“It’s an eclectic sub-tropical batch,” Rose said.

“You get a bug, and you keep on going.”

Roses’ journey growing tropical and sub-tropical fruit started in 2002 after being inspired by Owen Schafli who grows pineapples commercially with his wife Linda in Parua Bay.

Schafli started with 400 plants and now has more than 30,000 thriving on their property.

The couple also grows bananas, papayas, passionfruit, sugar cane, dragon fruit and even coffee.

“When I met Owen I was already doing kumara, watermelons, and beans commercially, and supplying the same outlets Owen was supplying,” Rose said.

“We hit it off. He shared his knowledge with me and from there I haven’t looked back.”

Rose, the chairman of Tropical Fruit Growers of New Zealand, created a nursery and sells his produce and plants from a shop on site, as well as at three Auckland markets and the Whangārei Growers Market.

“I had grown pineapples and bananas in the past but l always had an interest in growing things, particularly difficult things to grow,” he said.

“When I met Owen, I saw not only could he grow them successfully but commercially, and I decided that’s something I want to do.

“When anyone says you can’t do something, to me that’s a red rag.

“My mother always used to say there’s no such word as can’t. You can do anything if you try hard enough.”

Rose, a former police officer in the UK, has a background in farming, is a qualified electro-mechanical technician and calls himself “a jack of all trades”.

He moved to New Zealand in 1976, living in Auckland and Wellington before heading to Northland in 2000, initially in the Kaipara where he ran a beef and sheep farm for 14 years.

“Then we thought it was retirement time.”

The Roses moved to their current property in 2017 when it was a mix of bush and rocks.

“The previous owners had been using it as a hunting and recreation block and it was mostly overgrown and was a dumping ground for boulders.

“Contractors removed 60 truckloads of rocks before I could plant the first half acre of bananas.”

Rose said he takes his hat off to the many “hobby growers throughout New Zealand doing what I’m doing, growing what you usually can’t grow”.

“There’s no reason New Zealand can’t be self-sufficient in pawpaw, coffee and sugar cane … there are so many things we can grow and be totally self-sufficient with.

“If you go back to 1970s, New Zealand wines were virtually unheard of.

“Now we’re exporting to the world.”

EARLIER THIS year Niwa said 2021 was the country’s hottest year in more than a century of records, with a mean land surface temperature of 13.56C — or just shy of 1C above the 1981-2010 average.

Due to marine heatwave conditions, the institute is predicting periods of excessive humidity and hot temperatures are more likely.

According to Niwa, the impacts of climate change on New Zealand include not only challenges but “opportunities to do things differently to ensure a positive future”.

The institute suggests that: “As the country warms, high-value crops that are normally grown in warmer climates, like avocados, may be able to be grown in new areas of the country.”

Rose said there is huge potential for people to grow a variety of tropical fruits in Northland, which has few frosts, and steady high temperatures and humidity.

Temperatures moving up a few degrees makes a big difference, Rose said.

Rather than relying on overseas imports, we could be growing it up here, he said.

Growers in Northland are willing to give it a go; the country’s first commercial papaya plantation was recently planted at Kim and Rhett Cottle’s property near Houhora.

Aaron McCloy and his partner Elle Montgomery, of Far North Tropicals in Taipa, supplied the plants.

The Cottles’ project suggests an “increasing confidence” in growing tropical fruit in the region, McCloy said.

“They made a good decision; they had a 100m long tunnel house 20m wide which had blueberries in it – they pulled them out and decided to go into tropicals.”

McCloy and Montgomery have two greenhouses and several areas with windbreaks meaning most of their plants can be grown outdoors.

The couple supplies a handful of orchards around Northland as well as online customers and several stores around the Far North.

His business has been going for two years, but McCloy has been growing tropicals for 25 years.

“At some point I decided I can see the shift in what people are deciding to plant and moving quite strongly toward climate change friendly plants,” he said.

“The climate has changed significantly up here.

“A lot of our native plants and fruit trees are temperate, when temperatures get higher they get stressed.

“Our tropical species are most happy in summers that get nice and warm.”

McCloy started off growing dragon fruit, then moved on to papaya, and dwarf Cavendish bananas, starfruit and mangos.

Business began really taking off a couple of years ago, due to Covid-19, he said.

“Things started picking up with lockdown.

“People started really paying attention to their local space, and do they want to be paying expensive supermarket prices for fruit?

“They realised what was important. Your home and garden and space you live in is important.

“They wanted to look after themselves and families more with good fruit.”

OVER THE past few weeks, McCloy has travelled to a couple of properties to check out how the plants he’s sold are doing.

He often follows up with buyers to offer advice and guidance on growing his plants.

At one property: “They’ve got 20kg bunches of bananas hanging off their deck they’re eating, and it’s the middle of winter.”

McCloy has also spotted mango trees at an orchard in Takau Bay and many other tropical plants thriving around the Far North.

“Between Mangonui and Oruaiti there’s a mango tree there the size of a house and the owners are getting fruit off it now,” he said.

“If we’re talking about trees that are local, I know from personal experience there are mango trees in Houhora, Taipa and Rangiputa.”

McCloy said though most fruit is available only at local farmers’ and growers’ markets, he doesn’t think it will be long before they’re commercially viable and sold at supermarkets.

“We’ve had inquiries from people who want to put in a commercial-size pineapple orchard in Houhora.

“It means we can start to supply the larger supermarket chains. It’s economically feasible.

“We’re right at the cusp of there being a swelling of understanding, of why we’re buying these green from overseas when we can buy them from New Zealand with a much higher brix value [sugar value].

“I see the potential for agriculture up here is not limited to species that are temperate. We don’t need to limit ourselves to citrus and avocados.”