Almost twenty years ago, I spent two summers picking fruit in Roxburgh, Central Otago. I love Roxburgh and it is one of the places in the world that I feel most at home. Despite that, I’ve only been back a couple of times since then, the last time a few weeks ago when I spent a night there after detouring on my trip from Queenstown to Christchurch. It was the first time I had been there during autumn, and the orchards were a mass of colour.
Roxburgh is known as the “Fruit bowl of the South”, with stone fruit such as cherries, nectarines, peaches and apricots and the largest apple orchard in the Southern Hemisphere lies in Roxburgh East. I don’t know what kind of trees these are, but I think they are likely apricot trees.