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Wharehine gardening enthusiast Sue Andrew could hardly believe her eyes when she spotted dainty flowers sprouting from her red kumara vine.
She thought it must be some obscure weed growing underneath the vine. But after taking a closer look she realised the vine itself was flowering – something she had never seen before.
After doing a bit of research on Google, she discovered that the tropical vegetable is not supposed to flower in New Zealand. Some Kiwi farmers have grown kumara for 30 years and never spotted any flowers.
Sue suspects an unusually long, dry summer has prompted the flowers to emerge.
The flowers are light pink on the outside and a dark, pinky red in the middle. They are about 3cm in diameter. Sue describes them as “very special”. To cheer up neighbours during the Covid-19 lockdown, she alerted them to her discovery and dropped off picked flowers in local letterboxes.
“I’m very proud of them,” she says.
According to the New Zealand school textbook First Footprints, by Peter Adds and Bronwyn Wood, the failure of kumera to flower in New Zealand forced early Maori settlers to adapt their methods of cultivation.
In the tropics, seeds from the flowers could be used to plant kumera. Once it had grown, it was eaten straight away, since it could not last in the warm, damp conditions. In the colder climate of New Zealand, instead of growing kumera from seed, Maori would use shoots from tubers, which had been carefully stored over winter. The practice was facilitated by the development of underground storage pits, sterlised by fire. This permitted kumara to remain alive and ready to sprout in spring.
