Recently we visited Bodnant Gardens about half an hour’s drive away from our office in North Wales. Bodnant is a true national treasure; it owes much of its beauty to the Victorian-age plant collectors who brought back rhododendron, wisteria, magnolia, gentian, primulas, lily and azalea plant material from China.
Characters like Ernest “Chinese” Wilson were commissioned by wealthy Victorian industrialists to go and “collect for the nation”. As a result, there must be very few gardens and parks in the Western world that do not owe much of their attractiveness to Chinese and other Asian plants.
Also, many of the edible fruits we enjoy today came from China originally and the area of these fruits under cultivation in China is enormous. Clever marketing might call a fuzzy brown fruit with a green centre a ‘Kiwifruit’ – but of course it is Actinidia Chinensis var. Deliciosa or ‘Chinese Gooseberry’. Of the 60 odd varieties in the genus Actinidia all but 4 are native to China and Chinese Scientific institutes have a far greater collection of Actinidia germplasm than any other country. I will come back to Kiwifruit a little later.
| Commodity | Country | Quantity (1000 MT) |
| Strawberry | China | 3,336 |
| USA | 1,055 | |
| Egypt | 597 | |
| Apple | China | 45,983 |
| Turkey | 4,493 | |
| USA | 4,467 | |
| Pear | China | 18,978 |
| USA | 636 | |
| Argentina | 634 | |
| Peach | China | 16,016 |
| Spain | 1,197 | |
| Italy | 996 | |
| Grapes | China | 14,842 |
| Italy | 8,513 | |
| USA | 6,890 | |
| Kiwi | China | 2,400 |
| New Zealand | 628 | |
| Italy | 416 |
A while ago we focussed a newsletter on blueberries and how China has become the world’s biggest grower of this fruit over a couple of decades, and the world’s biggest market for it. Here are a few other crops that illustrate just how big the production lead is in China.
The figures to the left are for 2022 and obtained from UN Data, they are expressed per 1000 metric tonnes (so Chinese apple production is about 46 million tonnes) and show the top 3 producers per fruit.
Below is the data in a graph format, the sheer quantity of fruit grown in China is remarkable.
Back to Kiwifruit. Actinidia Chinensis seeds were brought to New Zealand in 1904 by Mary Isabel Fraser, the principal of Wanganui Girls College, who had been visiting mission schools in China. We all know the wonderful success story New Zealand made of this fortuitous circumstance.
Jump forward to 2016 when a grower in New Zealand of Chinese nationality was accused and convicted of smuggling cuttings of SunGold or G3 (a cultivar developed by Zespri) back to China. This incident still resonates negatively in New Zealand with Zespri suggesting that nearly all the gold Kiwi now grown in China is SunGold and thus belongs to Zespri.
Our understanding is that a court case was brought in China by Zespri in 2023. We understand Zespri’s concerns, we were careful to observe plant breeders’ rights when establishing our own berry fruit plantation in 2000. That said, China had a well-developed Kiwi breeding and growing industry in Sichuan and other provinces back in 2010. The gold variety that we observed growing on a visit to Sichuan in 2010 was Jinyan and was developed in China with the original breeding work commencing in the mid-1980s. My understanding is that Jinyan and the red Chinese variety are now being grown under licence in Italy. It’s an interesting world.
