Hawke's Bay

How apples came

The apple reached New Zealand in 1819, when the missionary Samuel Marsden planted apple and pear trees from New South Wales at Kerikeri, in the Bay of Islands^1,2. In Hawke’s Bay, missionaries such as William Colenso planted fruit trees and gave them away, but until the 1890s fruit was grown for the household or for a little trade³.

Commercial growing began in earnest in the 1890s. James Nelson Williams laid out a big orchard at Frimley, close to Hastings, in 1892 and added a cannery in 1904. By 1910 orchards, mostly of peaches, apples and pears, covered 546 hectares around Hastings, with hundreds more going in every year. Exports began early in the twentieth century, stopped during the First World War and grew large only between the wars³. In 1928 Vincenzo (Victor) Cacciopoli, an Italian-born grower, pruned his trees open by moonlight, leaving four or five leaders where New Zealand growers kept up to twenty; after one poor crop his yields broke records and the method spread³.

In 1960–64 Nelson and Marlborough grew nearly half the country’s apples and Hawke’s Bay about three-tenths², and in 1966 Nelson still supplied two-thirds of apple exports; by 2008 Hawke’s Bay supplied more than half of the export crop¹. From 1948 a statutory board, on which the government and growers sat, bought and marketed the whole crop, for home and export, until its selling monopoly ended in 2001^1,2.

The region also bred apples. At Havelock North, Don McKenzie of the government’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) selected and named Gala, raised by J. H. Kidd of Greytown, in the Wairarapa, from a cross of Kidd’s Orange and Golden Delicious made in 1934¹. In 1985, at the research orchard on Goddard Lane, Havelock North, breeders crossed a sport of Gala with Braeburn, and two of the seedlings became Scifresh and Scilate^1,4,5,6. PremA96, a small apple selected in 1996, was also bred in Hawke’s Bay, by Plant & Food Research^7,11.

How they’re grown

The ranges to the west keep off the prevailing westerlies, so the coast and the plains near it get more than 2,200 hours of sunshine a year and the Heretaunga and Takapau plains less than 800 mm of rain; Havelock North, whose orchards stand inside tall shelter belts, is calm most of the time⁸. The soils are fertile alluvium², in places rich enough that growers add no nitrogen, and wind machines guard against spring frost¹. Hail is the other risk: on 8 October 1986 a storm about 300 m wide crossed Hastings and Taradale in some ten minutes and badly damaged 450 hectares of pipfruit; 57 growers were hit⁸. Because the dry climate keeps scab and fruit rots in check, most of New Zealand’s organic pipfruit is grown here¹.

Stats NZ counted 5,860 hectares of apples in Hawke’s Bay in June 2022, out of 9,811 in the country, 4,977 of them in the Hastings district alone⁹. By June 2024 the region was down 5.2% to 5,550 hectares, of 9,520 nationally¹⁰. Large trees planted about 670 to the hectare gave way from the 1990s to dwarfing rootstocks at 1,250 to 3,000 a hectare¹, and the newest systems train trees as flat, two-dimensional walls, on which PremA96 gives 45 tonnes a hectare from three-year-old trees, against a national average of 65¹¹.

Cyclone Gabrielle struck between 12 and 16 February 2023, as the harvest was under way, and hit Hawke’s Bay and Tairāwhiti hardest¹². A survey of the region’s 150 growers by their industry body, checked against satellite images, found about 2,100 hectares, a quarter of the planted area, destroyed or so deep in silt that the trees were expected to die, 1,800 more flooded but workable and 4,400 untouched¹³. A year later about 610 hectares of trees had been lost in Hawke’s Bay and Tairāwhiti, about a tenth of the crop there¹⁴, and in January 2025 damaged trees were still dying as Phytophthora and other diseases took hold¹⁵.

What’s picked

Picking starts in February, and Gala is the first new-season apple in the shops¹⁴. On the Hawke’s Bay trees described in their patents, Scifresh is picked from about 12 to 30 March and Scilate from about 19 April for some three weeks^4,5; across New Zealand the harvest runs from about February to May¹. Scilate flowers from about 5 October⁵.

Hawke’s Bay growers account for about 70% of New Zealand’s apple export trade, put at $900 million a year in 2023¹². Nationally the 2024/25 crop was estimated at 553,591 tonnes: 379,750 exported, 108,561 processed and 65,279 sold fresh at home. Of apple exports in 2025, Gala made up 19.9%, Scilate 14.7% and PremA96 13.3%, ahead of Fuji, Cripps Pink, Scifresh and Braeburn; the planted area of the last three shrank by a third between 2022 and 2025^16,6,11.

In the 1960s the harvest ran from January to May, opening with Gravenstein and closing with sorts such as Sturmer Pippin, Rome Beauty and Granny Smith, first picked in April². The national marketing board handled 90 apple cultivars in 1968 and 27 in 1990, and in the early 2000s Gala and Braeburn made up about 77% of production¹.

On the table

In 2008 New Zealand exported about 60% of its pipfruit, ate 12% at home and processed the rest, mostly into juice¹. Processing has deep roots in Hastings, where James Wattie’s company, founded in 1934, started out canning and pulping fruit and vegetables³.

In Māori an apple is an āporo, a loan word already in print in 1898, when a newspaper offered to buy apples and other fruit from Māori¹⁷.

The first Hastings Blossom Week opened on 2 October 1950, with a parade of floats on 6 October; orchardists had a prize section of their own, and a Blossom Queen was crowned from 1957 until 1973. The festival lapsed in 1973 and returned 21 years later as Springfest, and the parade goes on: in 2026 it was set for 19 September¹⁸.

Notes

• The 1986 hailstones were mostly 10 mm across, a few up to 40 mm, and the damage was put at $39 million in 2010 dollars⁸.
• Organic apples were about a tenth of New Zealand’s apple exports in 2007¹.
• PremA96 was bred in Hawke’s Bay but first propagated by budding in Nelson⁷.

Where the sources disagree

• Hawke’s Bay’s share. Stats NZ’s figures give the region just under three-fifths of the apple area in 2024¹⁰ (my calculation); Fresh Facts, repeating the industry body, gives it 65% of apple and pear production¹⁶, and the foreign ministry about 70% of apple export earnings¹². Fresh Facts also puts the national apple area at 10,936 hectares for 2024/25, against Stats NZ’s 9,520^10,16; the census figures are used here.
• The cyclone’s toll. The early estimate of 2,100 hectares destroyed or expected to die¹³ far exceeds the 610 hectares later reported lost in Hawke’s Bay and Tairāwhiti together¹⁴.
• The end of the harvest. The industry body’s chief executive said February to April in 2024¹⁴; Te Ara gives about February to May for New Zealand¹, and Scilate’s harvest runs into May⁵. The season list follows the longer span.
• When Scifresh was crossed. Te Ara says 1984–85¹; the patents say 1985^4,5.
• PremA96’s parents. Its patent gives a sport of Gala crossed with a selection numbered GS 2184⁷; the breeder’s case study says Gala and Splendour¹¹. No source read says whether GS 2184 descends from Splendour.
• National, not regional. The 1960s harvest calendar, the export shares by variety, the processing figures, planting densities and yields are national; no Hawke’s Bay breakdown was found. The 1960–64 shares are my calculation from the 1966 encyclopaedia’s table².
• Elevation. The 6 m and 9 m are climate-station heights⁸, not orchard heights.