The Memory of Guavas

 There are two guava trees in the Towerwater orchard, one pink and one white. I planted them when I planned the orchard in 1992. I wanted the orchard to feel as though it belonged here, to fit with the old buildings and make sense of the place historically.

The two guava trees are next to the pathway on the left of the old front of the house

Guavas have always felt familiar to me. As far back as I can remember, there were guavas growing in the gardens of my older relatives, particularly those of my grandmother’s generation. They were just part of the landscape of my childhood. I never really thought about their origins.

The history of fruit interests me. Perhaps because fruit seems so ordinary, yet behind almost every familiar fruit there is a story of journeys, cultivation and chance. Explorers carried plants across oceans. Seeds found their way into gardens. People took cuttings from one place to another. Sometimes a fruit travelled halfway around the world long before anyone thought of it as belonging to the place where it eventually took root. That is what happened with the guava.

View of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) settlement at the Cape by François Valentijn

It is recorded that the Dutch had introduced guavas to the Cape before 1685. When I came across that date, I wanted to know more. François Valentijn visited the Cape of Good Hope in 1685 and recorded what he saw in the Company’s Garden. Among the fruits growing there were guavas, which he noted “grow very well”.

It is only a passing remark, really. But I like those little remarks in old records. They can tell us things that people at the time probably didn't think were worth mentioning. Valentijn wasn't trying to tell the future that guavas would become part of the Cape landscape. He was simply noting what was growing in the garden in front of him.

A guava blossom in the Towerwater orchard

And yet, there it is. By 1685, the guava was already growing successfully at the Cape. That made me wonder from where it had come.

The guava is native to tropical America, so by the time Valentijn saw it growing in the Company’s Garden, it had already travelled a very long way. Exactly how it got to the Cape is less certain. It may have moved through the Portuguese and Dutch networks that connected the Americas, Africa and the East Indies. Perhaps it came as seed, or as a cutting, or as a living plant carried from one colonial garden to another.

What we do know is that by the late seventeenth century it had taken root here. And suddenly the two guava trees in my orchard seemed to have a much longer story behind them. That sent me looking in another direction.

Bananas, Guavas and Other Fruits by  Albert Eckhout, circa 1640

I started looking at old paintings, wondering when guavas first appeared in European art. Paintings can sometimes preserve things that written records don't. A painter might carefully record a fruit simply because it was unfamiliar or beautiful, without realising that centuries later someone would look at the painting as evidence of what was growing in a particular place. That is how I found Albert Eckhout.

Eckhout was working in Dutch Brazil in the 1630s and 1640s, during the time of Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen. Among the paintings associated with his time there is Bananas, Goiaba e Outras Frutas—Bananas, Guavas and Other Fruits. It was painted before 1640, and the guavas are there among the other tropical fruits. I find the painting fascinating.

Eckhout was interested in recording the unfamiliar world he encountered in Brazil—its people, plants, animals and landscape. The fruits are painted with a remarkable amount of attention. You can see their shapes, colours and textures. They aren't simply there to fill a space or make the picture look pretty. They tell you something about this strange and abundant tropical world that European viewers had never seen for themselves. And the guavas caught my attention.

Close up of the guavas in the painting, Bananas, Guavas and Other Fruits by Albert Eckhout

Here was the same fruit, growing in Brazil more than three centuries ago, before it travelled to the Cape, before there were guava trees at Towerwater, before I ever thought about planting one.

Eckhout's painting is also very different from the Dutch still lifes I tend to think of when I think about seventeenth-century fruit paintings. There is no dark room with an elaborate table, silverware, porcelain and a collection of carefully arranged objects. The bananas, guavas and other fruits sit outside, on a simple ledge, with the sky behind them. It feels almost as though you are looking at the fruit where it actually grew.

And sometimes I wonder about our two guava trees. Do they somehow carry the memory of where they came from? Brazilian trees, carried across oceans and centuries, now growing beneath an African sky in the Klein Karoo. It sounds fanciful, I know. A tree doesn't remember the way we do. But still.

There is something about them that makes me think about belonging. Their roots have settled into this soil. Their branches have learned this sun, this dry air, these seasons. They have become part of Towerwater, and yet the fruit they bear is the same fruit that once grew in a completely different world.

Perhaps that is what a plant does. It carries its history without knowing it. The guava on our tree is a small, living record of all those journeys, of people carrying plants, of gardens and empires, of seeds and cuttings moving from one continent to another. Somehow it has travelled all that way and ended up here.

So when I pick a guava from one of our trees, I sometimes think I am holding something that has travelled much further than I have. A little piece of Brazil, rooted in the Klein Karoo. And perhaps that is why these trees feel as though they belong here, they do, but they also remember somewhere else.

Sources:

Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën (Old and New East-India), Volume 5, by Francois Valentijn published between 1724 and 1726.

Wikimedia Commons, File:Albert Eckhout - Bananas, goiaba e outras frutas.jpg

Die geskiedenis van Boerekos 1652–1806. DPhil thesis, University of Pretoria, 2003, Claassens, Hester Wilhelmina.