Gods of the golden weather: An ode to stonefruit

Saturday, 17 January 2026

Summer is more than sunhats and sunscreen - it’s about the quest for the perfect apricot, Mike White writes.

Last year, we were visited by cataclysm.

It was late, late spring.

The temperatures had risen, the days had grown longer, so had the grass, and the sound of lawn mowers had become almost constant.

And with such hopeful harbingers of summer, came a greedy anticipation of a feast.

Stonefruit.

It’s an unromantic name for some of the greatest gifts trees have given to humans. Advertising boffins would no doubt come up with something much better nowadays, something that didn’t sound like a palaeontological exhibit. But so it is.

It encompasses everything from cherries to apricots to peaches to nectarines to plums. If it’s not a food group on its own, it should be.

I grew up in an area where fruit such as these weren’t uncommon. We had peach trees, a white nectarine, and loads of plums in our backyard.

Nearly everyone seemed to have fruit trees then - perhaps a function of larger sections, a quarter-acre affording more scope for plantable land.

And surrounding the town’s edges were cherry orchards, magnificent forests of trees weighed down with black-purple bunches come December.

The orchards were where schoolkids got jobs, picking and packing fruit. It was a teen rites of passage in the province.

I did it for a while, but wasn’t quick, nor enthused by lugging ladders that never seemed tall enough to reach the best fruit.

Everyone did pick-your-own (PYO), though. Buckets in hand, traipsing down rows, trying to find trees everyone else had neglected or bypassed.

And everyone naturally samples the product, purple lips and tongues exposing the over-enthusiastic as they lifted their pickings on to the scales. They really should weigh people before and after a PYO cherry session, and make them pay the difference.

There were always Agee jars of preserved fruit at home, which Mum had somehow managed to bottle, along with everything else on her domestic schedule.

Apricots, plums, golden queen peaches, skinned and sliced. Foolishly, you took such abundance for granted.

For years, I was too itinerant to contemplate growing fruit trees, or lived in places too inclement for their survival.

In Wellington, we were held hostage by the capital’s weather, denied by the salt and fury of south coast storms. Anything edible that grew to maturity there was either exceptionally hardy, or a miracle.

Imagine then our excitement on shifting to Central Otago, and inheriting a half-acre flush with fruit trees: Apples, nectarines, peaches, apricots, cherries, plums. A couple of walnuts for good measure.

I sprayed them with copper. I watered them diligently. I surrounded their trunks with mulch. I watched them flourish, from bud to blossom.

My mind and stomach got ahead of themselves. I pictured them in my grabby fist. I pictured them in puddings. I pictured them in the pantry. I pictured magnificent bounty.

But I was a naive glutton, a presumptuous gannet.

One weekend, we had to go to Queenstown for the night.

That was the night the weather gods conspired to let a late frost descend from the skies.

By the time we returned on the Sunday afternoon, it was all over.

It was ground zero in the garden.

All the trees’ leaves were wilted, already black and burnt. Nascent fruit had dropped. Nothing had escaped.

We stood on the deck looking over the wasteland in silence.

Well, not complete silence. I remember a bit of swearing and recrimination about the injustice of it all.

If we’d been home, we could have covered the smaller trees, and maybe saved something.

As it was, nothing could be salvaged. The entirety was buggered.

The trees grew leaves again, but were barren when it came to fruiting.

All my early-season imaginings and picturings went sour and vanished.

But thankfully, not everyone was afflicted. And stepping into the breach were orchards down the road, who had protected their trees from frost and pestilence where I had failed.

So we ordered boxes of bounty from them. Boxes and boxes.

So much so, I don’t think I’ve ever eaten as much fruit as I did last summer.

We were ever so regular customers at the tin shed shop down the highway, where huge nectarines and ripe orange apricots tempted us.

For a few weeks, another orchard nearby opened their rows to the PYO public.

In they flocked, everyone reaching high for the best bunches and ripest fruit.

We wandered along the rows of nectarines, which blended into peach trees, which then became apples. We clambered up ladders. We assessed whether the fruit were perfect or flawed in some petty way.

We picked far more than we planned: There’s always one more that looks too impeccable to leave. And another one. Oh, and what about that one …?

We had fruit for breakfast with muesli. We had it for mid-afternoon snacks. We had it in puddings.

Meanwhile, the trees in our garden licked their frosty wounds, and gathered strength.

By winter, I was again spraying them with some copper concoction every gardening guru recommended.

By spring, we were anxiously monitoring weather forecasts to check if frost threatened to sneak up at night and annihilate the budding crop.

Some nights we’d be out after 10 o’clock, trying to secure old sheets and tarpaulins over the trees. We draped and pegged and pinned.

But the late frosts never came, and our gently gestating fruit were spared.

Well, all apart from the apricots, which were the first to foolishly welcome spring with their tender buds, and did get frostbitten. The trees looked sad and sick, suppurating sap. I felt sorry for them, but even more sorry for myself, at the reality we wouldn’t have homegrown apricots this summer.

But there is an answer - though it requires speed and cunning.

Each season, local orchards offer pre-ordering of their upcoming fruit.

The most prized among these offerings are the Moorpark apricots.

They have been swooned over for centuries: Jane Austen wrote about them. A city in California was named after them. American president Thomas Jefferson favoured them.

And their persisting popularity is shown by how quickly they sell out each year. They’re always the first to go when pre-orders go online - in a matter of hours, entire crops are spoken for.

We learnt not to dally last year. This year, I was poised at 9am when advance sales started. Getting good fruit is serious business.

Because, let’s be honest, what supermarkets offer are so often pallid and bland. No zing. No juice. No sweetness. Apricots barely, only in name.

Let me count the ways I love a perfect apricot.

More importantly, let me count down the days until the courier van arrives down the drive, and a harried man swings out of the cab, rustles in the back of the vehicle, and strides over to me, bearing 5kg of local glory.

Our own trees are too juvenile and imperfect to keep us supplied.

So courier man will repeat the journey many times more over summer.

Each time I will spy him coming, stop the old dog from hobbling out and barking at him, and take possession of a wondrous new batch of an old, old favourite.