‘But isn’t that already true of the olive, its roots can descend … ?’
‘Yes, yes, but I want to take a strain of tree that has lived all its life, all its genes, in that aridity. A tree that will instinctively know how to survive, how to fight back when the waters of the world run dry. Because the planet is hotting up, lady. Over one hundred countries are already suffering water deficit. Here, in Europe, a third of Spain is in trouble. Cyprus, too, as well as Sardegna, Sicilia and mainland Greece. The wars that will be fought will be fought over water. We will need those new olive trees.’
I was speechless.
My travels were done. It had been almost two years since I had landed in Beirut. Two years, with short breaks at the farm, in quest of the olive tree and its stories. I had set out looking backwards digging into its history, its journeys across the Mediterranean, but it seemed that after everything, perhaps the most mind-blowing discovery was that I was looking at its future.
Michel’s plane was due into Milan the following afternoon. I had one night free, for myself. I said arrivederci to Attilio, thanked him for our enlightening lunch and set a course for Florence.
The city was bursting at the seams, of course, not a room to be had anywhere. It was Saturday evening. Eventually, I found a suite in one of the palazzos and decided to take it. I had been in cargo pants and hiking boots for almost six months. This was Florence. After a shower I went shopping, returning to my totally luxurious pad with two pairs of new shoes, strappy and satin, a silk skirt and three sleek Italian T-shirts. I ate dinner out on the terrace and watched the Florentines unwind, strolling the streets hand in hand. Tomorrow, I would be meeting my husband again for the first time in months. And I would recount to him what I had found. The olive tree as a model, a tool for a future … that could possibly stem the onslaught of climate change and drought.
A NEW BEGINNING
It was nudging June when Michel and I drove up the winding, badly-in-need-of-resurfacing tarmac that is the entry to this farm of ours. Stubby-nosed little green fruits on the trees in the old orchards greeted my arrival. I was both delighted to be back and a little disoriented. I learned on the journey from Milan that Michel had already been calling in quotes from forage experts, the drillers for wells.
‘We will also need to install new pipes for the drip-feeding,’ I sighed, considering the work of the boars.
And we were one dog short, laid to rest with past companions in the shade beneath the spreading boughs of one of our fruiting cherries. Our hunting hound, Bassett, had been poisoned during my travels by – what irony! – a slug pellet.
‘An insecticide used on lettuces.’ Michel had decided not to break it to me until journey’s end.
‘On our grounds?’
‘No, the vet thinks that the pellets were bought by another landowner, a neighbour, and hidden within food to destroy the wild boars. Bassett found it.’
Distressing as it was, it somehow seemed to fit the tune of things. One more mark on the postcard I was painting to send to the giant chemical companies.
I embraced smiling Quashia and handed him a couple of Bernardo Agostini’s Sicilian bottles. The following day he said, ‘We’re getting better at this olive oil business. This batch is excellent.’ He cannot read our alphabet. I had to confess it wasn’t ours, but he was right about its quality. There was definitely no colza cut in with those litres.
I did not unpack my bag for several days and while Michel and Quashia were at work repairing walls damaged by boars and shoring up the garage roof that had begun to cave in during my absence, I strode slowly up and down the slopes of our hillside trying to reacquaint myself with its geography. Like a sailor after months at sea, I was attempting to find my legs, my equilibrium. I settled myself within the hollow of one of our biggest fellows. For two years, with breaks, I had been travelling. In search of the secrets of the olive tree.
Starting right here I had begun to delve into the past, but among the many questions I was returning with was: where does this lead me? After all this travelling, what, if anything, had changed?
Who the original people were who took cuttings from the family of the Oleaceae, genus Olea, the wild olive tree, known also as Olea africana or Olea chrysophylla, and grafted it with another to give us the Olea europaea, our cultivated Mediterranean olive tree, I had failed to identify. Or, rather, these olive trees had retained their secret. The location, time and ancestry of that original cultivar remained their protected mystery.
I breathed in the perfumes of the mountain-growing garrigue plants, the tranquillity, the routine normality of an agricultural environment while I recalled that wild Sardegnan tree. Three thousand years younger than the ancient twisted colossi I had found two years back in the Lebanese mountains behind Beirut. I rose again, restless, clambering across our terraces. The soil beneath my sandalled feet was crumbly and dry. Nothing had been watered, but the cherries were ripe. I picked a few and ate them in the sun. In my journeyings to find the spirit, the mysteries, of the olive tree, the great gift-giver, I had crossed war zones, calm seas, thousands of years and many cultures. I had gazed upon prehistoric cave art, marvelled at the secret of a golden Minoan ring, stood in the deserts alongside a forgotten Roman mill, stared upon a 3000-year-old sprig transported from the eastern Mediterranean to Sicily. All, save for the cave art, within the lifespan of the 6000-year-old living beings, still flowering, still fruiting, that I had encountered in Lebanon.
But somewhere there was a piece that was missing.
I had hoped to dazzle with figures. To set down the miles I had covered over the sixteen months out of twenty-four, but I had hopped back and forth, changed course so many times, that I had dizzied myself with calculations and so had abandoned the idea. What does it matter? Throughout all of those miles, those days on the road or sea, the olive tree had left clues, fed me, come to me in stories, snippets, treasures, puzzles, but it had retained for itself the answers to my principal questions: Where do you come from? Who first cultivated you?
Do the answers to these questions matter? Well, I remain curious.
Looking backwards at these journeys, I felt immense gratitude for all that had been shown to me, but what I was left with was not the questions about the past, though I will continue to search, but the future. The present and the future. The face of the Sardegnan tree looking out at me in the present. If these beings, these magisterial survivors, have held their own for such a monumental stretch of time, unimaginable to us short-lifers, don’t they deserve a little respect? A pause for awe? The olive’s longevity, its duration of service, had always impressed me. So, too, its grace and metallic beauty, but only during these last few laps had I begun to comprehend what a masterful organism the tree is and, in particular, the olive tree.
The earth is hotting up, the ice is melting, wars are annihilating homelands, flattening heritage, breaking apart communities, groundwater is drying up, is being polluted, and we are killing ourselves off at an alarming rate due to the cancers triggered in our systems by build-up from the pesticides in our foods. Who can we turn to, to assist with these almighty calamities? Might the tree have a role to play and again, in particular, the olive tree?
It was early December. I was descending the hillsides, looking out towards the glinting winter sea, returning from the olive mill, where the gossip had been fast and the farmers were gloating. Word was out that the EU had recently fined Italy a sum exceeding seventy million euros to be deducted from their upcoming agricultural grants for ‘unfulfilled commitments within their olive sector’.
‘You’re a traveller. What do you think of such a disgrace, Carol?’ Gérard had called out to me. I had shrugged, laughed silently to myself, recalling Attilio and the frankness with which he had admitted that ‘Here, in Tuscany, we produce twenty thousand tons of pure Tuscan olive oil a year, but we sell eighty thousand.’
‘I think I know a few honest Italians,’ I shouted back.
The farmers had hung thei
r jowls. ‘There’s no such animal’ was their united Provençal response. The last time I received a communication from Attilio he was planning his trip to the Sahara. ‘There’s no time left to dream about it,’ he had written. ‘I have to act. The future depends upon it.’
Swinging a hairpin now, I heard the swish of heavy liquid. The back of our old bus was awash with empty olive crates and close to seventy litres of the finest oil, pressed not an hour earlier. The sun was shining. This was our last load of the year. We had pressed a little over a ton, or 1000 kilos, of fruits this season. Soon it would be Christmas and our annual gatherings of friends invited to celebrate and decant all the fine juice.
I was thinking about inviting silver-haired René, our first olive guru, over for a glass along with his business partner, Raymond, the water sorcerer.
Coincidentally, during my previous mill visit, in late November, I had bumped into them, not seen since the year before.
‘This season,’ they boasted, talking over one another like a couple of schoolboys though the total age between them was 170, ‘we have been pressing a ton of olives a week!’ They were beginning to metamorphose into an old married couple.
‘With so many private wells, your production and water expenditure must be second only to Andalucía,’ I joked, recounting light-heartedly some of the concerns I had discovered throughout my days on the road.
René was opening a fine bottle of cru classé rosé. He was a man of substance these days and revelled in his exalted position.
‘Carol, you are getting as bad as that bloke who wants to change the world,’ he riposted, as he handed me a beaker of wine, calling over to Gérard, our miller, to enjoy a glass with us.
‘Who’s that, René?’
‘That fellow who lives up behind Nice who reckons he’s found the answer to the olive fly. A dreamer, he is, a Utopian. You’re two of a kind, Carol.’
And that was how we found out about Luke.
While I had been trekking the Mediterranean, ironically, a petit turn of events had been digging its heels in back here at home. The organic farming revolution. In France, they call it L’Agriculture Biologique, abbreviated to bio, which means organic. The movement was fast taking hold in a small-scale way. Alas, one of the only sectors to be dragging its heels was the olive, due to Dacus, the blasted olive fly, our friend the mouche, who was still refusing to go away unless plastered with pesticides. This was until Luke, modest vegetable and olive farmer, had made a little experiment on his own groves. But no one seemed to be shouting about it from the rooftops, no Stop Press had arrived from the olive bodies to inform us of this extraordinary turn of events.
I tracked him down, this ‘Utopian’, and he confirmed that he had just completed his first, highly successful harvest, his first outing with Psyttalia Lounsburyi.
‘A tropical beauty and a natural enemy’ was his description for the fly that preys on Dacus.
‘How does this work?’ I asked Michel. ‘Do we buy the fly by the box or by the dozen and then let them loose in the garden? Will they prey on other creatures?’
‘Let’s invite him to lunch and find out.’
I smiled.
‘I’ve made the decision,’ he said. ‘I’m with you. No more pesticides.’
Luke had agreed to visit, to tell us all about Psyttalia Lounsburyi, the fly that stalks the olive fly.
I pulled up the drive, hooting. Three dogs came storming down to greet me. An old white van was parked up alongside one of Quashia’s untidy heaps of sand. I spotted the two men further up the grounds, standing beneath one of our four-hundred-year-olds. The stranger, dressed in denim, a hand’s length shorter than my husband, was waving his arms about, talking heatedly. I glanced swiftly through the window into the back of his van, wondering whether it might be packed tight with boxes of tropical insects. Disappointingly, there were a few gardening tools and a pair of boots. Little else. Little to suggest that the proprietor of this vehicle was offering a radical alternative to the way we and others are running our farms, feeding our families. I called out and the men turned. Michel beckoned me up. I climbed the stone steps alongside the stables. Luke, smiling, stepped to offer his hand. He could have been any age from forty to fifty-five, slender, fit with a presence that was calm but an energy that was determined.
‘Two per cent of French farmers have shifted to bio, Luke has been telling me,’ said Michel. ‘It’s very exciting. This new fly, Lounsburyi, the predator of Dacus, is originally from Kenya. Come on, let’s go inside. Lunch is ready. This is a whole new departure for our olive farm.’
The men stepped on, talking enthusiastically. I held back a moment. Turning my gaze round the garden, up into the groves, images from my journey flooded back. At the caves of Altamira I had read that the wild olive had been in existence in prehistoric times and had grown along the Rift Valley. Syria and Lebanon, the north of the Rift, I had been thinking, not Kenya way down in the south. I began to smile, appreciating the irony. From where the earliest traces of wild olives have been found we are seeking assistance, reaching out towards a less tainted tomorrow.
Your origins remain your secret, I mumbled to the groves. But the past and the future are irrevocably linked and time is perhaps not of your making, but ours.
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Where do olive trees come from?
The olive tree is native to the Mediterranean (and perhaps Africa) where it has been cultivated for its fruit and oil for at least six thousand years.
How long do olive trees last?
An olive tree of thirty-five years is beginning to reach fruit-bearing maturity. In Provence the locals say that a hundred-year-old olive tree is still a baby. In Lebanon I discovered a natural miracle: two small groves of olive trees that have been scientifically dated at over six thousand years of age. They are still thriving and the fruits are collected annually and pressed into oil. An olive tree is a rare gift to its farmer. Unlike most tools or plants, the older it gets, the better it performs.
Where does most of our olive oil come from today?
Olives are the most extensively cultivated fruit crop in the world. Today, there are close to ten million hectares of olive groves cultivated worldwide. Spain is the foremost producer of both the fruit and oil.
Has olive oil always been as important as it is today?
The Garden of Gethsemane, in Jerusalem, where Christ spent his long night of vigil before his arrest was rich with olive groves and mills. Gat shemenim is Hebrew for oil press. Those old trees that one can visit today in the Garden of Gethsemane were saplings when Christ was seeking courage for his upcoming trials.
What’s the difference between green and black olives?
All olive fruits begin green and will eventually turn black if left on the trees until fully ripe. Some varieties are picked green because their flavours are better used before they are ripe. One of the taste differences in olive oils is caused by the moment of harvesting. Younger fruits – green fruits – tend to have a sharper, more peppery taste whereas black olives create a more golden oil. The olives can be pressed for oil at any stage. Blacker fruits produce more oil but not necessarily the most flavoursome.
What is extra virgin olive oil?
European regulatory standards state that olive oil with a 0.8 per cent acid content or less can carry the ‘extra virgin’ label. Between 0.8 and 2 per cent, the oil is labelled ‘virgin’.
It is illegal in Europe to sell olive oil with an acid level of 2 per cent or more for foodstuff.
Is it okay to fry with olive oil?
Unlike oils produced from seeds, olive oil remains stable in its chemical structure at relatively high temperatures, so it’s good to cook with. This is due to its high antioxidant and oleic acid content. The smoking point for most pure olive oils is somewhere around 450°F. It is better not to cook olive oil beyond this temperature. Extra virgin oil reaches smoking point earlier, somewhere around 250°F. So for frying, it makes sense not to use your best extra virgin oil.
How do people in other cultures use olive oil?
In the Middle East and Turkey, almost everyone begins their day with a small spoonful of olive oil. They believe it wards off cancers and keeps their blood pressure normal. The olive bark is used in homeopathic remedies as a treatment for physical exhaustion and mental fatigue. In ancient Rome, pregnant women applied olive oil to their skin to prevent stretch marks. It still works today and many people in the Middle East still use olive oil as a preventative measure against stretch and burn marks.
What are the benefits of using olive oil?
The polyphenols in olive oil are natural antioxidants. They lower cholesterol levels, help protect against heart disease and high blood pressure, and can reduce the overall effects of ageing, keeping skin supple, hair shiny and joints from becoming stiff.
Here are a few of Carol’s favourite recipes, all of which make use of her delicious olive oil.
ROAST CHICKEN WITH A MEDITERRANEAN ZING
Moroccans have added lemon and olives in the preparation of their chicken dishes for centuries.
Ingredients:
1 whole chicken (I use a free range or organic chicken but if budget necessitates a regular supermarket bird will serve just as well) ¼ kg wholegrain brown rice (I use organic rice from the Camargue, but again, this can be adapted to suit requirements and white rice will do)
The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2) Page 41
