Olive Trees
ESSENTIAL
I really didn't know what to write about today so I reverted to making photo books of our recent holiday in Italy. And I came to our visit to an olive grove which was full of incredibly ancient trees. This one has been carbon dated and is over 2000 years old! We were blown away - but then later on we were taken to view another tree, which they haven't dated but which they think is over 3000 years old. And in the process it has developed a spiral trunk and has to be propped up. They have no idea how the spiral occurred but it certainly did. Mind you Wikipedia says that the oldest known tree is about 2,000 years old and it is not any of these - so who knows. The guy did say it had been carbon dated though.
As you can see though, perhaps the most remarkable thing about these trees is that they still produce olives. (Fact - olive trees produce olives every two years, not every year.) And they are hollow. You could see right through some of these trees and yet there were new green shoots.
So - very old and very Mediterranean. They have apparently been grown commercially for at least 5,000 years - Syria being the most likely starting point for its cultivation. Or Cyprus - which, it seems, is the world's largest consumer of olive oil per capita.
In Puglia where we were holidaying, olive trees were very obviously the main crop. You could stand on any of the hilltop towns and look out over a sea of olives (as in the photo at left). It was very definitely a monoculture. I gather 40% of Italy's olive oil comes from here. However, the industry is currently under threat from a bacterium that is killing the trees. It's a race to find a cure.
And now Australia is getting in on the act - of growing olives that is. What is really surprising is that we have not had a big olive oil/olive industry here until comparatively recently. But also I gather some have escaped into the wild and have been classified as noxious weeds, which is a bit sad is it not?
Olive trees are very beautiful in their own special and individual way - and interestingly, perhaps not as beautiful in bulk. But they are very much of the Mediterranean. The two are inextricable.
"It sits lightly on the earth and its foliage is never completely opaque. There is always air between the thin grey and silver leaves of the olive, always the flash of light within its shadows.... If I could paint and had the necessary time, I should devote myself for a few years to making pictures only of olive trees. What a wealth of variations upon a single theme!" Aldous Huxley
As you know my middle name is Olive. I'm not a huge fan of olives themselves, though I like their flavour in different dishes, but I am a huge fan of olive oil and I do love olive trees. There is something very much to my taste in the grey/green/silver colour of the leaves and their lightness. In some ways they resemble gum trees - it has just occurred to me.
In one of our holiday homes there was a mini olive grove in the garden which inspired me to plant my own tree, which I followed a few years later with three more. And they have endeared themselves to me in that they have actually grown - the first one even had a few olives one year - so they are obviously more my thing than lemon trees. I have tried to take a photo but because they are so loose and open it is very difficult to see. I haven't planted them for their olives - as some people I know have - but just because they are beautiful trees. Well to me anyway. Perhaps not so much when young - but definitely when old. Maybe one day they will grow enough to be seen properly.
They are beautiful to artists too. Their strange shapes and shifting foliage have provided inspiration for many of the greats. Apparently Van Gogh painted at least 18 pictures of olive trees - here are two of them:
And Monet too - this one is rather like the olive grove around our French house this time. But there are also heaps of other artists who have painted olive trees.
