Actinidia deliciosa Cultivation spread from China in the early 20th century when seeds were introduced to New Zealand by Isabel Fraser, the principal of Wanganui Girls' College, who had been visiting mission schools in China. The seeds were planted in 1906 by a Wanganui nurseryman, Alexander Allison, with the vines first fruiting in 1910. People who tasted the fruit thought it had a gooseberry flavour, so began to call it the Chinese gooseberry, but being from the genus "Actinidia", it is not related to the gooseberry family, Grossulariaceae. The familiar cultivar "Actinidia deliciosa" 'Hayward' was developed by Hayward Wright in Avondale, New
Gooseberry River 1870s, when commercial fishers moved into the north shore region. Loggers followed in the 1890s. In July 1899, Colonel John H. Knight and former Senator of Wisconsin William Freeman Vilas, owners of the Superior Lumber Company, acquired for $1,000,000 land around the Gooseberry River estimated to contain four hundred million feet of standing pine. Logs felled from the forests around the Gooseberry were rafted to Knight and Vilas's lumber mills in Ashland, Wisconsin. One year later, these lands were acquired, along with Knight and Vilas's Ashland mill, by Thomas Nestor of the Nestor Logging Company for $1,250,000. The Nestor Logging