Is this the oldest tree on earth? It has been estimated that fossilized leaves found in the Aegean dated from 37,000 B.C. You may find this hard to believe—how can the experts go back that far with any accuracy?—but we know for certain that olive trees were cultivated before 3000 B.C. And the olive and its oil? Lawrence Durrell memorably described them this way: “A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.”
With reasonable care, an olive tree will live and give fruit for five hundred years or more. An old saying has it that “a hundred-year-old olive tree is still a child.” It transplants well, which endears it to those pépiniéristes who specialize in instant gardens. They are delighted to be able to sell you, at vertiginous prices, childlike hundred-year-old trees that they have uprooted and shipped in from some secret valley. The olive will thrive in its new home; they guarantee it, which is not always the case with living things, especially those that are bundled around the countryside in trucks as unceremoniously as sacks of cement.
The olive’s adaptability is only one of its heroic qualities. It is a remarkably tough and forgiving tree, capable of surviving decades of neglect, attempts at strangulation by brambles, and suffocation by weeds. To restore an overgrown olive tree to perfect health, it is enough simply to clean around the base of the trunk, uproot the brambles, and prune severely. (The central branches should be cut back so that the traditional dove, always recruited for this purpose, can fly through the middle of the tree without stubbing its wings.) Add a little fertilizer, and the following season the tree will fruit.
The olive has one mortal enemy: le grand gel—extreme and prolonged cold. Olive growers still shiver at the mention of 1956, the most gloomy milestone in recent olive history. That year, the month of January had been unusually mild, and the trees sensed an early spring. Sap began to rise, buds were on the way. And then, overnight, the temperature dropped to 20 degrees Fahrenheit, and stayed there.
Disaster. Trunks split, roots froze, a million trees died in Provence, and it was touch and go for millions more. For these half-dead trees, the treatment was extreme. The trunks were sawn off just above ground level in the hope that the roots had survived and would throw out new shoots. Amazingly, many of them did, and more than fifty years later you will find, all over Provence, trees that have grown up next to the massive amputated stumps of their ancestors.
Even these stumps are impressive, more like oddly sculptured plinths than casualties of the cold, and it is easy to see why artists have found the trees such a fascinating—if frustrating—subject. Van Gogh is said to have painted nineteen studies of olive trees but complained about the difficulty of doing justice to the subtle, changing colors of the leaves. Bonnard’s answer to the problem was to paint them gray. Renoir went even further, painting his trees in gold or pink. But no picture can ever come close to reality—the glorious sight of an olive grove on a fine day, with a breeze through the leaves making ripples of silver and green.
When at long last an olive tree dies, it leaves a wonderful legacy: the wood, dense and smooth and honey-colored, marked by the centuries with a grain of black and dark brown. The Romans had a law forbidding its use for domestic purposes; olive wood was to be burned only on the altars of the gods. Today, unless the wood is lucky enough to fall into the hands of a craftsman, much of it will end up in souvenir shops, reincarnated as corkscrew handles, a rather undignified end to a long, useful, and beautiful life.