Feijoa, elephants and growing community and food in the city

For the past three years, a group of feijoa-loving, community-minded city centre-dwellers have come together on a May evening for the Quietly Raucous Feijoa Festival.

This year’s festival, held at Tabac, was themed around both feijoa and elephants – with a talk by historian Edward Bennett on the elephants of Auckland, in particular Tom, who used to live in the Albert Park Barracks with a tortoise friend – and a competition to see who could make the best feijoa elephant.

On the link between feijoas and elephants, Mik says, “Really there’s none. Last year we had a talk about heritage toilets.”

“We try to do things slightly differently to everybody else, there are plenty of events in the city, and this one is particularly aimed at a neighbourhood level.”

The idea of neighbourhood and community is one of the things that inspired Mik to found The Guild of the Feijoa – which is responsible both for the festival and the city centre feijoa forest on Constitution Hill near Beach Road. The Guild, a close ally of city centre community-builders Splice, arranged permission and funding from council back in 2015 to plant a number of feijoa trees in a steep area that was otherwise underused.

Feijoa forest. Image: The Guild of the Feijoa

“Connections between people living in apartments are an important antidote to possible isolation and offer a richer and more enjoyable social life and engagement with community.”

As well as creating connections between people, the other ideas that drove the creation of the Guild are that feijoas should be free – Mik says it’s “some kind of inherent, biological right” – and that living in an apartment shouldn’t mean you have to completely disengage from connection with the outdoors.

“That might involve looking after trees and planting and that sort of thing – we come together every year to harvest the feijoas”.

As the city centre continues to grow as a place to call home, we’re sure we’ll hear lots more stories of people who live here creating the community and the lifestyle they want to enjoy in the city – and we look forward to sharing more of them with you.