Olive

“ In vain does the threshing floor, and in vain do the barns await the promised harvest. The heavy grapes, with the long branches of the vine, are scattered about, and the berries with the boughs of the ever-green olive. ”

“ The light which never leaves its foliage, silvery beneath and sparkling from the upper surface of burnished green, the delicacy of its stem, which in youth and middle and old age retains the distinction of finely accentuated form, the absence of sombre shadow on the ground beneath its branches, might well fit the olive to be the symbol of the purity of classic art. ”

“ It abounds in old Italian gardens, where the boughs are trimmed and interlocked into vaulted corridors in which, from point to point, as in the niches of some dimly frescoed hall, you see mildewed busts stare at you with a solemnity which the even grey light makes strangely intense. A humbler relative of the ilex, though it does better things than help broken-nosed emperors to look dignified, is the olive, which covers many of the neighbouring hillsides with its little smoky puffs of foliage. ”

“ The only thing that I can remember against the landscape is the prevalence of olive orchards. I hailed as a relief the stubble-fields immeasurably spread at times, and I did not always resent the roadside planting of some sort of tall hedges which now and then hid the olives. But olive orchards may vary their monotony by the spectacle of peasants on ladders gathering their fruit into wide-mouthed sacks, and occasionally their ranks of symmetrical green may be broken by the yellow and red of poplars and pomegranates around the pleasant farmsteads. ”

“ The blossom of the olive groves was succeeded by tiny green olives which swelled in the heat until they were ready to yield their rich oil which was so welcome to the people of other lands. Artists worked happily on the plaster walls, laying on their colours to delight the eye, potters kneaded their clay until it was as butter under the ball of the thumb. ”

“ I delight in seeing people begin with me as they do with olives, making all manner of horrid faces and silly protestations that they will never touch an olive again as long as they live; but, after a little time, these very folk grow so desperately fond of olives, that there is no dessert without them. ”

“ A withered olive tree, without fruit or leaves, grows by the side of the foolish maidens, and a healthy olive tree, laden with fruit and ready with abundance of oil, is beside those maidens who were wise.
But on the whole the olive is an Italian, and more particularly a Sienese, symbol, though Botticelli also loved the silvery leaves. In his magnificent ‘Pallas taming the Centaur,’135 painted for Lorenzo de’ Medici, to commemorate his diplomatic victory over the King of Naples and the League in 1480, olive encircles the head of the lovely goddess and is wreathed about her dress. ”

“ I was pale and sad in the South like the olive-trees
That droop their silver heads by the dusty roads,
And are grave and cold and grey in spite of the sun...
In the veils of rose and blue that the bright dawn spun
Day wrapped me round in vain! ”

“ One wonders how these slender fragments of trunk can support that spreading weight above, especially in wind and tempest, and how that wealth of blossom and fruit can draw sufficient sustenance through such narrow and splintered channels; but the olive is tough, and the oil that runs in its veins for blood keeps it ever vigorous. ”

“ The olive groves! His daily life could not escape the olive groves; to olive groves, sooner or later, his walks, his expeditions, his meanderings by the sea, his shopping⁠—all led him to these ubiquitous olive groves. ”

“ If he bought a picture postcard to send home, there was sure to be an olive grove in one corner of it. The whole place was smothered with olive groves, the people owed their incomes and existence to these irrepressible trees. The villages among the hills swam roof-deep in them. They swarmed even in the hotel gardens.
The guide books praised them as persistently as the residents brought them, sooner or later, into every conversation. They grew lyrical over them:
“And how do you like our olive trees? Ah, you think them pretty. At first, most people are disappointed. They grow on one.” ”

“ The olive is a tree the least known in America, and yet the most worthy of being known. Of all the gifts of heaven to man, it is next to the most precious, if it be not the most precious. Perhaps it may claim a preference even to bread ”

“ Men climbed the trunks, everywhere shaking the laden branches and hitting them with long bamboo poles to knock the fruit off, while women and children, squatting on their haunches, spent laborious hours filling baskets underneath, then loading mules and donkeys with their daily “catch.” But an olive to eat was unobtainable. ”

“ Here and there rises the olive, like smoke from a lowly cottage. It shrinks from the bite of the frost and the lash of the wind, and attains its proper height and vigour only as we near the sea; and is in the utmost luxuriance between Solliès Pont and Le Luc, growing on the rich new red sandstone, that skirts the Montagnes des Maures.
Presently we come on the lemon, the orange, glowing golden, oleanders in every gully, aloes (“God’s candelabra”) , figs, mulberries, pines with outspread heads, like extended umbrellas, as the cypress represents one folded; cork trees, palms with tufted heads ”

“ And this is the reason why the olive should wave its branches over the other trees. For, like manna, it is a composite growth—a food, a fruit, a medicine. Always fruitful for a three-fold end; and never failing to be prolific, the trees bearing even for centuries.
And this is why the prophet Jotham reports the trees as first urging the olive to become king; and why he felt disappointed when the olive tree, in the beginning, refused, saying:
"Should I leave my fatness, wherewith by me they honor God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees?" ”

“ Passing, for the present, Montpellier, where people with consumptions used to be sent to swallow dust, as likely to be soothing to the lungs, and to breathe the balmy zephyrs of the whispering mistral, I made straight for Lunel, in order to get from thence to one of the strangest old towns in France—Aigues-Mortes. All around us, as we hurried on, were vines and olives—a true land of wine and oil. The olive-tree did not improve on acquaintance—it got uglier and uglier—more formal, and more cast-iron looking, the more you saw of it. ”

“ For as children are bright creatures of swiftly changing moods, so are the olive leaves in the blue southern air. I once read of an artist who essayed to paint a group of olives and a cypress growing before them. Against their silvery leaves its dark burnished form stood finely mysterious, the contrasting grey lending it a depth of almost sable colour ”

“ If the olive is pruned while the sap is rising, or still worse while in flower, each branch lopped off is a mortal stab, a wound through which the tree will loose its life blood. The sap will run heavily for some days, especially if they are damp and rainy, no time being afforded nature to close the outlets made with the pruning knife. ”

“ By adding to what precedes the incredible longevity of the olive tree and the immense consumption that is enjoyed by its product in all the civilized parts of the world, it will be readily understood why Columelle, Parmentier, and so many other famous agriculturists of past and present generations have called it "The first of all trees," and why the Italians, whose oil production exceeds that of any other country, have popularized the proverb that we should never tire repeating in California; "An olive plantation is a gold mine on the surface of the earth." ”

“ The Mission olive contains well developed seeds in the same proportion that all others do, viz., the poorest olive for oil or pickling is the best for seed. The olive nearest approaching the wild type, the olive that contains the largest seed in proportion to the berry, is the best for planting. One tenth of the stones of the wild olive have a double germ and this is the best of all olives for seed, second the Mignolo, third the Razzo, Leccino, Puntarolo and Trillo, fourth the Grossajo and fifth the Morajolo. ”

“ In Spain it may be said to be the favorite olive, but in some of the northern provinces where the tree is out of its element it gives no fruit at all but only attains a colossal size and hence is classed by the country people as a wild tree. But as we shall proceed to show it has none of the attributes of the wild tree, so far from it that it is one of the "oil press olives," one of the varieties most highly domesticated and cultivated that the world knows. ”

“ The baking Mediterranean sun, whose relentless rays strike the parched land almost daily throughout the dry season, ripens fruit to perfection. The olive tree in particular demands little and yields much. ”

“ This olive is of middle stature and is fond of sheltered spots with rich and deep soils. Fogs do not harm it. It is very prolific, produces many blossoms and gives fruit in abundance. The berries form in bunches of five, six, seven and even nine in a cluster, and bend the branches to the ground with their weight.
The berries are long and bulged at the lower end, fleshy, but do not give as much oil in proportion as some of the foregoing. This olive has the peculiarity of fruiting on the wood of the year and is therefore an annual. ”

“ The olive-tree attains to a great age: some specimens on the Mount of Olives are estimated to have been 2,000 years in existence. Olives, commonly pickled in brine, are chiefly used in England for dessert or between courses, to remove the flavour of the viands previously eaten. ”

“ If, in the cultivation of the olive tree, one were to be guided by the ancient beliefs that have come down to us through the ages, it would appear that when once planted it can be left to take care of itself. ”

“ The olive if kept low will have more vigor than if allowed to grow high, but do not oppose the nature of the tree too much. If it is of a variety that attains a great stature, to a certain extent it must be allowed to have its own way. ”

“ When olive culture and oil making come to be better understood, where each variety is given the treatment it demands and olives are gathered at the moment best suited for making the oil, we shall probably hear less about the lateness of the Cornicabra in ripening under a California sun. ”

“ The wild olive is a small tree or bush of rather straggling growth, with thorny branches and opposite oblong pointed leaves, dark greyish-green above and, in the young state, hoary beneath with whitish scales; the small white flowers, with four-cleft calyx and corolla, two stamens and bifid stigma, are borne on the last year’s wood, in racemes springing from the axils of the leaves; the drupaceous fruit is small in the wild plant, and the fleshy pericarp, which gives the cultivated olive its economic value, is hard and comparatively thin. ”

“ Like all fruit-trees in France, the olive is most carefully trimmed, and clipped, and tortured, and twisted into the most approved or fashionable shape. The man who can make his oliviers look most like umbrellas is the great cultivator; and the services of the peasants who have got a reputation for olive dressing are better paid than those of any agricultural labourers in France. ”

“ It is thus that we have been cradled in our younger days by such old sayings as: "An olive tree requires a wise man at its foot and a fool at its head;" and yet: "Make me poor and I will make thee rich;" from which we should infer that the tree is not so much in need of a costly stirring of the soil as it is of a careful pruning. ”

“ In passing over a long period, during which the praises of the olive tree have been sung in many tongues, we come to that great agriculturist, Parmentier, who during the last century was instrumental in the introduction of the potato into France. He says: "Of all the trees that the industry of men has made profitable, the olive tree deserves, without contradiction, the very first place." ”

“ Then, in the olive-groves that stretch along the level shore, are labyrinths of rare and curious plants, painted tulips and white periwinkles, flinging their light of blossoms and dark glossy leaves down the swift channels of the brawling streams. ”

“ The olive contains more protein than any of the other common fruits, and with the exception of the alligator pear is the only one containing any appreciable amount of oil. Until within a few years we have been eating this valuable fruit in its unripe state, but now we get it, both imported and home grown, ripe. There is just as much difference between a ripe and green olive as between a ripe and green apple. ”

“ It is doubtful whether the olive produces more oil when picked barely ripe, or at full maturity, or when it commences to fall from the tree. The usual belief is in favor of a deferred harvest, and the country people express it in the couplet that heads this chapter. ”

“ The most popular of modern Italian representations of the Virgin and Child is very justly that painted by Niccolò Barabino131 and entitled ‘Quasi Oliva Speciosa in Campis.’ Large branches of olive, painted also ‘with great love,’ are placed about the feet of the sweet-faced Mother, who peeps through her heavy white veil, and they almost hide the fruit of temptation which lies on the ground beneath. ”

“ By Romanists the Olive is deemed a fitting emblem of the Virgin Mary, as the mother of Christ, who brought peace on earth, and who was the Prince of Peace.——In regard to the Olive-trees of the Garden of Gethsemane, eight of which are still stated to exist, Dean Stanley says: “In spite of all the doubts that can be raised against their antiquity, or the genuineness of their site, the eight aged Olive-trees, if only by their manifest difference from all others on the mountain, have always struck even the most indifferent observers. ”