An olive branch

A crystalline sunlight poured through the olive groves, brushing each graygreen leaf with silver and throwing the green and purple fruits into sharp relief. It was a warm, late November afternoon, and Nunzio Murano was proudly showing me his olivettes, or olive orchards. We were in the hills rising over the valley of the Durance river, just south of his hometown of Les Mées in the alps of Haute Provence. As the crow flies, we were less than 150 miles from Italy, from where Mr. Murano's family emigrated when he was a child. Knowing how much I love olive oil, he had made a detour to show me his groves on the way back from a meeting with the carpenter. (Mr. Murano is the master mason overseeing the restoration of our mas in nearby Revest-des-Brousses.)

We bumped along earthen roads that twisted among thousands of parcels of olive trees, their borders apparent only to their owners. Mr. Murano, for example, seemed to know each of his mature trees by sight--that is, he knew their individual faces, and where his trees ended and the neighbor's trees began. On this particular afternoon, the groves were lively with people. Trucks and beat-up cars were parked here and there, and people were busy harvesting the plump purple olives. Some olivette owners, like Mr. Murano, had kept their trees pruned to strictly human dimensions. Others followed a pruning style that made for taller trees, requiring high-tech step ladders for harvesting. Either way, harvesting involves time-tested technique and is done strictly by hand. First, the non-fruit-bearing branch tips are pruned to facilitate harvest. Tarps or nets or sometimes simple bed sheets are spread out under the trees, and everyone seems to use the same yellow plastic hand-held rakes to strip the fruits from the branches.

While in Italy, for example, the olives are most often harvested green, in Provence, people traditionally turned to the olive harvest after other autumnal agricultural chores were completed and the olives had started to ripen. Provence's colder climate also means that olives take longer to ripen. In Nyons, the northernmost AOC olive oil producing area of France, the olives are harvested as late as January, after they have become partially dried and shriveled. This extremely late harvest gives Nyons oil its characteristic bouquet.

In Les Mées, the newly harvested olives are transported to one of several local olive presses which will press them for a fee. Mr. Murano gets plenty of extra virgin oil for his entire extended family, all of whom live next door to each other, as well as his friends. ( I myself am the lucky recipient of a huge recycled whiskey bottle of Murano oil, and I can vouch that is fruity, buttery, and delicious.) The rest is sold, and this revenue just pays for the upkeep of the trees and the pressing. But never mind the balance sheet. For Mr. Murano, his olivettes are a labor of love. He is not an expressive man, yet in his olive groves, he is positively rhapsodic over his trees. "Is this not beautiful?" he asks me, as we wander among one of his groves, their branches drooping under the weight of a prolific crop. "I love olive trees," he adds. "I come here to relax, to re-source myself, to connect to my traditions."

The olive tree is in a class by itself, as anyone who has traveled the Mediterranean knows. I know of no other plant that has as much tenacity for life, nor is as entwined with human existence, as the olive. Olive trees live for centuries, and trees still live which were planted in Roman times. In southern France, you will often see what looks like three to six olive trees growing in a close clump. These trees are survivors of a terrible freeze in 1956 which decimated two-thirds of the groves. Killed back to ground level by the cold, the roots patiently sent forth new growth, giving rise to the strange clumps you see today. Unlike most trees, whose wood becomes senescent at maturity and incapable of generating new growth, olive wood remains forever juvenile. The boles of ancient trees are covered with sprouts of new growth (which are pruned off to channel the trees' energy into fruit). Old olive trees develop gnarled, knotted trunks of fantastic form and character, and are nowadays often sacrificed to the landscape trade, where they command prices of thousands of euros.

Since their domestication more than 2.500 years ago, the olive has thrived in the presence of man, and human society in the Mediterranean basin has coevolved with the olive. A tree hundreds of years old is testimony to centuries of human interaction--careful pruning and cultivation that have kept the tree vigorous. Such a tree has, in its turn, nourished generation upon generation of people, provided them with a primary item for trade, and even lit their dark winter evenings with simple oil lamps. The oil of the olive tree, more than any other food, has shaped the rich and varied cuisines of the Mediterranean. In France, for example, cooking styles are sharply demarcated between the northern two-thirds of the country, where butter is the basic fat, and the southern third, where it is olive oil (except in the southwest, where the primary fat is goose and duck fat). The olive unites cuisines as diverse as Provençal, Moroccan, Italian, Greek, Spanish, and eastern Mediterranean. For these cultures, the olive is the most basic symbol of life, and of the very existence of the culture and continuity of these peoples.

The olive is also, not surprisingly, our most ancient symbol of peace, as the olive grove cannot be cultivated in a war zone. An olive tree requires care and attention to thrive and be fruitful. Many peaceful years are needed to produce an olive grove, whose trees require at least 30 years to reach the plateau of maximum yield which can last for centuries...if peace prevails. The olive has numerous qualities which evoke peace. The oil can be burned for light; its cleansing power is associated with purification. The tree's longevity easily translates to fertility. Hercules was protected by a wreath of olive leaves. With all these extraordinary, live-giving, -affirming, and --preserving qualities in a single tree, it is hardly surprising that the olive has symbolized peace at least since the founding of Rome. The white dove which bore the olive branch as a message of peace from God to Noah, has become itself a peace symbol only by association with the all-powerful olive.

For me, the olive is also a powerful symbol of peace between humans and the natural world. The olive requires patience, care, nurture, diligence, and a longterm perspective from its human caretakers. As Mr. Murano said of his youngest grove of trees only five years old, their supple young branches already loaded with fruit, "I planted these for my children." The olive, in return, rewards generation after generation of humans for their respect and care with the very substance of life itself: nourishment and light. What more powerful symbol could we wish for our frightening times, when our ruthless disregard for and exploitation of the natural world is threatening to bring it tumbling down around our ears? On our national seal, the eagle clutches an olive branch bearing thirteen leaves and thirteen fruits, symbolizing peace for the 13 original states. May we reflect on the true meaning of this national symbol, and walk in its shelter.

For most of Western culture, the olive is fraught with meaning and emotion. And for the peoples of the Mediterranean basin, the olive means life. Which is why I was especially devastated to learn that Israel systematically destroys olive groves in the occupied territories. This seems to me not a random hazard of war, but a deliberate antithesis of tendering the olive branch. The destruction of centuries-old olive groves is a terrible symbol--one that hurts me deeply, one whose implications I can only try, most painfully, to imagine for the people whose lives were centered around those groves. And I am sure that the olive groves of Iraq--and the lives of those who depended on them--have suffered from the terrible war we are waging there. If I have one wish for the New Year, it is that we cease to cut down the olive groves of others--symbolic, real, or both--and try to remember what it means to be the first to offer the olive branch.

 

 

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