There’s a tree opposite the Woodcote entrance that has been causing mayhem for years. Dropping apples on the road, troubling cars, doing its wild thing on the verge where nobody planted it. Hannah, our orchardist, had to laugh when she first clocked it — because that “nuisance” tree turns out to be one of the more interesting apples in the valley.
It’s what’s called a chance seedling. It grew from an apple core thrown out of a car window, took root on the roadside, and rose up on its own. “It’s a brand-new apple,” Hannah says. “No other apple tree exists like it, unless you get exactly the same pollination again. And that one has a decent resistance to black spot — which is something that can really affect the health of an apple.”
So this winter she is grafting it, naming it, and adding it to the heritage fruit collection growing along our Fruit & Forage Loop.
Heritage trees, and the wild ones nobody chose
Not every old tree is a heritage tree. A heritage variety has age and pedigree — a known name, a known line, qualities people have valued and recorded for generations. The tree opposite Woodcote has none of that. “Chance seedlings are what you’d politely call the bastards,” Hannah says. “Trees of no significant origin or parentage. They’ve just grown and risen up from the depths of whatever — and some of them become incredible trees.”
Some are rubbish, she is quick to add. But not most. “From what I can tell, about one in five of those roadside trees has something in them that needs to be kept and preserved. Those disease-resistant wild roadside chuck-outs are some of the best trees around.”
That is the part most people miss. We tend to protect the trees with a pedigree. But the unplanned ones — the seedlings nobody chose — are out there quietly solving problems on their own: shrugging off disease, handling a wilder climate, fruiting heavily with no spray and no help from anyone.
Monty’s Surprise
If you want the proof, it is already famous. Monty’s Surprise is a roadside chance seedling found in 2000 by Mark Christensen and friends, near Whanganui — a big, old, obviously disease-resistant tree growing where no one planted it. Today, through the Heritage Food Crops Research Trust, it is one of the most studied apples in the world.
Its skin carries some of the highest measured levels of certain health-giving compounds — quercetin among them — of any apple yet tested, and it has been part of international research into fighting bowel cancer. A thrown apple core on a roadside became, decades later, a piece of medicine. “It has the highest health qualities of any apple in existence,” Hannah says. “Because it’s been tested to buggery now.”
There are trees with that kind of potential on Hannah’s radar right here in Upper Hutt.
Why the timing matters
Here is the worry. As the valley intensifies — more building, more urbanisation, the loss of farmland and the widening of roading corridors — these trees are the first to go. “They’re just getting bowled over,” Hannah says. A nuisance apple on a verge has no protection. Nobody planted it, nobody owns it, and it disappears under a digger without anyone noticing what was lost.
And what is lost is not just a tree. “Some of them hold some really key pieces for our food in the future,” Hannah says. “Things that are thriving should be preserved.” Each one is a one-off combination of genetics that took decades to assemble and exists nowhere else. Bowl it over and it is gone for good.
So a big part of our Fruit & Forage kaupapa is exactly this: finding the wild ones worth keeping, grafting them before they are lost, and growing them on in our heritage nursery alongside the named heritage varieties. The apple opposite Woodcote is the first of many.
Help us keep them in the ground
This is where the Fruit & Forage Loop comes in. We are turning our existing farm loop into a living trail of abundance — a hundred fruit and nut trees, a heritage nursery, medicinal and native species — and a place where trees like the Woodcote apple get a second life instead of a digger.
We are raising $15,000 through the Ma Earth Round 3 funding round to plant it. Ma Earth runs on quadratic funding: the matching pool — drawn from the Biome Trust and the Naia Trust, and shared across more than 200 nature-regeneration projects — is divided not by who gives the most, but by how many people give at all. So the number that matters most to us is not dollars. It is people.
Give anything — even $5 — and verify your email when Ma Earth asks, because verification is what unlocks the match, often five to ten times over. Donations open Tuesday 1 July and close Monday 21 July.
Back the Fruit & Forage Loop at the Ma Earth page here — and help us make sure the next Monty’s Surprise doesn’t end up under a digger.
#alwaysbeplanting