PUTTING DOWN ROOTS

It’s 7am on a cold and drizzly winter morning several hours’ drive out from Rotorua. A man equipped with a headlamp and a clanking miscellany of tools shivers in the predawn darkness. He yawned himself awake several hours earlier in a warm bed far away from here, and is now trudging in worn gumboots through the mud and branches deep into a New Zealand pine forest.

Glen Chen is here to plant ginseng — a root plant that has been used as a traditional herbal remedy for centuries by the Chinese and Native Americans alike. Chen runs the largest ginseng plantation in the country. The company he founded, KiwiSeng, boasts plots covering some 100 hectares