The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2)

by Carol Drinkwater

  He had never heard of such Mafia involvement.

  By now we had climbed inland to the apex of a hill that overlooked a valley forested with the Ogliarola Barese variety. These were the weird big fellows I had been photographing earlier. It was a remarkable sight with, occasionally, in the far distance, the peaked dome, all askew, of a tumbling trullo. This was agrarian Italy, scenic, at its loveliest.

  Puglia was a surprise. It was an area that had been invaded and conquered on countless occasions over the past 2500 years and I was beginning to glimpse both in its nature and its architecture the diversity that had unfurled beyond such a cosmopolitan battlefield. We wound down into the valley. Here, my new acquaintance showed me how the trees were farmed. At the foot of each, a wide circumference of earth was tamped until compacted. Nothing grew on this rich, brown-red circle of soil. The trees were so tall that even with the assistance of every modern Italian harvesting appliance, reaching the branches growing out from the apex proved challenging. The firm earth solved the problem. When the fruits fell they were gathered swiftly, with ease.

  ‘Why not just lop the crowns, keep the trees shorter?’

  They were pruned in such a way because experience and study had taught the pugliesi that for this variety, their vertical form produced the finest fruits and bumper harvests. The olives, big bitter drupes, from these upstanding oleasters possessed the highest polyphenol content in Italy.

  Bitonto was quite a famous little town, I discovered from Francisco, clearly a loyal inhabitant. Guide on our evening stroll of its Romanesque heart, he was exalting its rather lovely cathedral. Bitonto’s nomenclature, ‘City of Olives’, was born from the density of groves in the surrounding countryside and the ninety olive mills operating within the town itself. During the pressing season the noise through the busy streets had been untenable until, under duress, the city council shut down a number of the mills and moved the oil businesses to the countryside. Francisco’s father-in-law, whose machines had operated in a basement, had been a victim of this Quieter Town policy, but he was intending to launch a spanking new enterprise elsewhere.

  Bitonto was the first district in Italy to open its mill doors each autumn, ten to fifteen days ahead of anywhere else. As in our Alpes-Maritimes area, there was a time-honoured date for the commencement of pressing. For us, it had always been the third week of November, but with shifting weather conditions our millers were grudgingly being forced to reconsider this tradition. Here, the doors were unlocked the day after the second feast of I Santi Medici, the Healing Saints. Their principal feast day was 26 September, but they had been designated a second one, the esterna, which fell on the third Sunday in October. This enabled the completion of the harvests before celebrations. The labourers were then relaxed and spruced and ready to party and pray.

  I was interested to know whether this region was suffering from fruits ripening too early. Francisco had noticed a week or two’s shift, yes, but he did not seem unduly concerned.

  ‘Do you know the cult of the two Healing Saints?’ he asked.

  I did not.

  Cosmos and Damian were twins who had practised their skills in Arabia and Roman Syria. In AD 303, they were tortured, beheaded and martyred. News of their courage and miracles – their most renowned was the transplanting of a black Ethiopian’s leg on to a white patient! – spread fast to the Byzantine east and via the Roman trading routes reached this Adriatic coast. Bitonto was the final stop along the pilgrim’s route. The saints’ relics were held in a reliquary in Bitonto’s cathedral.

  Fascinated, I looked their history up later and found that their two skulls are kept in Munich. I also discovered that the same two skulls (unless they had two heads apiece) were housed in Madrid. But wherever various bits of their bodies rested in reality, the candlelit procession through the streets of Bitonto, with the local women barefoot and praying, on I Medici’s second feast day was, according to Francisco, a spectacle to be savoured.

  I countered his saints’ story with one of my own: a more gruesome, less holy, tidbit that I had come across by chance, also with its roots here. It concerned a family of princes from northern Puglia, the Sangro family, one of the most illustrious dynasties in southern Italy. One of their clan, Raimondo de Sangro, the seventh Prince of Sansevero, who claimed kinship to the Bourbons of Spain, the Dukes of Burgundy and, on his father’s side, was a direct descendant of Charlemagne, was the subject of my tale.

  ‘Are you acquainted with the peranzana olive?’ I asked Francisco as he led me into a cavernous candlelit taverna in a very pretty town, Palo del Colle, neighbouring Bitonto.

  ‘Ma certo, of course.’

  The Provençal olive tree known in Italy as peranzana – peranzana, in the local dialect, is the adjective for provenzale, Italian for provençal – has all but disappeared from France. In fact, I could not find one mention of its existence anywhere in my own country.

  ‘As far I know, it grows only around Daunia in northern Puglia,’ offered my scientist friend.

  ‘Well, it was introduced here from Provence towards the middle of the 1700s by the prince, Raimondo de Sangro. Raimondo was a philosopher, an alchemist, a leading Freemason and gifted celebrity of his time who loved to challenge the moral codes of the day, and he was feared for his secret, rather creepy experiments. Gossip whispered that he was a murderer who saw seven cardinals off to heaven and produced chairs from their skin and bones.’

  Francisco was laughing.

  I asked him if he had any idea why an aristocrat, who was anything but a man of the soil, would trouble to bring a French olive to a region already heavily planted with many of its own cultivars.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Might properties from the oil of the peranzana olive have been a necessary component for one of Raimondo’s alchemistic experiments? Might Raimondo, who was infamous for his experiments in his search for the secret to eternal life, have believed the olive, this Provençal variety in particular, with its low acid level, might aid him? Raimondo had famously boasted that when he died he would rise again.’

  Francisco knew nothing of the prince’s story. He knew that San Severo called itself Olive Oil City, even though its production was far inferior to Bitonto’s. It produced some quality oils, my host confirmed, and the peranzana variety was one. How or from where it had arrived into Puglia, my dinner companion would not hazard a guess.

  ‘Italian researchers and biogeographers are working with tree DNA in an attempt to discover and log the parentage and origins of every Italian olive. It is a long-term challenge because Italy boasts close to three hundred different varieties and Puglia has the densest concentration of trees on the peninsula, from which comes 40 per cent of the country’s entire oil production. On a global level that represents about 20 per cent.’

  ‘Perhaps Raimondo was ahead of the game. Perhaps he had discovered the advantages of the Mediterranean diet long before anyone else had conceived of such a notion,’ I smiled, lifting a glass of the very excellent local red wine Francisco had ordered for us. ‘I read that when Raimondo’s grave was opened up, it was empty. His body had disappeared, and has never been recuperated. True to his bluff, he had risen from the dead.’

  The following morning, we set off from my hotel early to drive out beyond Giannoccaro to the renowned nursery Nat and Julia had worked with. In the passing groves around us were mixed varieties of trees pruned in a selection of styles. It was like staring into an agricultural jewellery shop. Francisco pointed right, towards the middle hilly distance.

  ‘Over there, there are stone mills still operating in the caves where they have turned for centuries.’ He did not specify the precise location. ‘Unfortunately, your programme is too short to visit them,’ he chided. ‘You should stay longer.’

  A warm sunny day was breaking. I wanted to learn from scratch the rudiments of grafting.

  ‘It’s the act of causing two cuttings or parts from different plants to grow together; the insertion of scions or smal
l shoots from one tree into another.’

  ‘But why, with so many varieties in existence, would nurseries bother?’ I demanded.

  ‘For the purposes of developing hardier stock.’

  From Roman times, grafting has produced effective results with olive trees and the Italians, or the Romans from Pliny the Elder onwards, mastered the skills better than the rest of the olive world put together.

  And I was keen to learn a few of their secrets.

  ‘What I would like is to see the process of grafting from a cultivated tree on to a wild olea, to try to understand how this might originally have come about.’

  ‘Carol, there are no wild olives left anywhere in Italy’ was Francisco’s response, ‘but there are possibly a few examples of very ancient cultivars.’

  ‘Any in this region?’

  He doubted it. At some date, post-World War II, when olives became modish, many of the venerables were uprooted and sold for fabulous sums; the equivalent of two thousand euros per tree.

  ‘Ha! They fetch much higher prices in the South of France,’ I laughed. ‘Proprietors of stylish gardens and chic hotels and restaurants will pay above market value for a centenarian olivier, if they can get their hands on one. They buy them in from Spain.’

  Such botanical trafficking had since been outlawed in Puglia. It had made a handful of canny farmers wealthier, but it had scarred the landscape and impinged upon heritage.

  ‘To protect the trees, the regional Puglia Park of Secular Olive Trees—’

  ‘Such a municipal title!’

  ‘—was inaugurated. All trees older than a certain age,’ Francisco could not recall the precise age, ‘must by law be registered, maintained and protected.’

  What did he know of the towering stands I had come across in Calabria with crowns as expansive as oaks?

  ‘Their custom is not to prune, care for the trees or gather fruits on an annual basis. The calabresi are a rough bunch,’ spoken by the scientist at my side. ‘They prefer their oil bordering on rancid. It is a peculiarity of theirs. In the south of Puglia, some of the villagers follow the same practices.’

  South of Lecce, the trees were not left to grow quite as tall as the Calabrian forests, nor did they become so unruly, but the fruits were gathered directly from the earth whenever the population felt the mind to do it. Those pugliesi southerners also preferred a rancid oil.

  ‘Such country folk have deeply embedded opinions. They don’t alter their habits to suit modern fashions.’

  I spent several days in Francisco’s company and we talked olives non-stop. There was so much to learn! Much of what he spoke of was beyond my comprehension: protoplasms, germplasms, molecule markers, cell structures. I don’t have a scientific bone in my body so, on the whole, we avoided viral matters and stuck to farming or Italian history. I spoke of the labourers I had seen in southern Spain gathering mounds of fruits with automatic sweepers. Francisco conceded that occasionally it was practised in Italy but the tonnages were less, so it was not really necessary.

  I recounted much of what I had learned about the abuse of water and resulting pollution in southern Spain and my fascination with the olive as a desert regenerator.

  Francisco confirmed that Puglia suffered acute water shortages. Aside from three small rivers, the region lacked surface water. In past times, exceedingly deep wells were sunk; some said that the earliest trulli were well covers, he explained, but whenever possible these days it was the habit to cultivate the orchards without irrigation. When water was required, wells were bored. Around the coasts, this was a less daunting prospect because the water stayed closer to the surface but inland it was necessary to drill to seven or eight hundred metres.

  In the orchards as we drove by, occasional figures, solitary or working in small groups, were threading their drip-feed piping through the trees’ crowns.

  ‘All Italy has taken up this method. It conserves water and protects the earth.’

  ‘Protects the pipes from the wild boars, eh?’

  ‘Not only. When the pipes were placed round the feet of the trees, farmers stopped working the soil. Lifting the pipes, moving them out of the way, was too time-consuming, too much hard work and when the weeds shot up, it was easier, quicker, just to spray pesticides all around the roots. Pipes in the trees like electricity wires are unattractive, I agree, but it means the soil is cleared without impediment and no toxic products are used for the purpose.’

  ‘You favour organic farming?’

  ‘Of course. The Israelis have come up with a method of feeding the water pipes underground.’

  ‘That sounds like a good idea.’

  ‘Yes, but the technology is still being worked on.’

  I could not see why it would be so difficult.

  The evening previous, over an aperitif with Francisco and his wife who did not join us for dinner because she was babysitting, I had recounted my experience in Palestine, of planting trees with Israeli peace activists.

  ‘Why are you doing all this?’ Dora had demanded, as others had.

  ‘It began as a quest, to seek the historical roots of the olive tree.’ I told them about Lebanon, described the 6000-year-old oleasters, the emotions standing alongside them. I showed them photographs. ‘They are possibly the oldest living beings on earth.’ Then I spoke of the Roman mill in Algeria, talked of the olive sprig in Sicily …

  ‘I have been tracking traditions, myths, trade routes.’

  Francisco shook his head. ‘We have nothing like that here.’

  ‘But now that I have come almost full circle, my interest has shifted to the future. There is so much I think we are in danger of losing.’

  ‘Some of our nurseries and the more experienced farmers are grafting their oldest cultivated specimens with younger varieties, to give them new leases of life. There’s a future that might interest you?’ Dora again.

  *

  ‘This has nothing to do with genetic modification,’ emphasised the grey-haired proprietor of the nursery, with his half-moon glasses, worried face and tweed hat. ‘The birth of grafting was organic, a natural development. In nature, plants do on occasions come together, bonding to create a strain that might have a better chance of survival. Perhaps prehistoric man observed this and decided to give it a try himself.’

  I asked whether he thought it possible that from the Middle East came the knowledge, the know-how, of olive cultivation, brought by navigators to a western Mediterranean already abounding in forests of wild oleasters.

  He had never given it any thought.

  ‘Basic plant propagation – seeding, rhizomes, bulbs, layering, cuttings, grafting – has existed since almost time immemorial,’ he explained. ‘Long before Mendel and the birth of modern genetics. Most of the changes and improvements on the earlier methods have been developments in techniques caused by scientific progress in plant physiology, biochemistry, environmental influences.’

  Had I known that every tree grown from a stone is in essence a new variety? I had not. ‘But the market insists on knowing the provenance of its produce. From where came its mother and its father? Rather like people.’

  We proceeded to the first of a series of tunnelled greenhouses. I was about to witness the grafting process from beginning to end.

  ‘First, an olive stone is planted in a shallow bed of soil. The shoot that grows from that stone is known as the rootstock.’

  We strolled by row upon row of tiny pots, hundreds of them, each with a slender shoot hardly firmer than a short piece of string.

  ‘Within the world of grafting, the rootstock is the mother. The tree that grew the fruit from which we took the stone must be known, identified. Its variety must be declared and it must be a plant that is virus-free.

  ‘Once planted, the stone is left for three years to develop into a sapling.’

  ‘Why three years?’

  ‘That is the time the tiny tree needs to attain a certain width – about that of a finger – before it can be slit gen
tly open and receive its other half, the father, its partner in the grafting process.’

  We moved to another of the elongated greenhouses.

  ‘Three years later, in the progress report!’

  Here, for me, was where the skill really came in. The tender bark of the three-year-old was gently incised and into it, like an act of coitus, was inserted a snip of a twig, about two inches in length, plucked from a different variety of olive. The provenance of the twig, the scion, must also be declared and be virus-free. The two were then bound together, to close the join, with a spill of heated wax.

  ‘The wax seals in the juices: the sap of the baby tree and the water content.’

  Now, the two parts, held as one, were left to fuse. Looking at them, newly mated, leafless, just a basic woody state, they reminded me of newly hatched bald chicks. Ninety per cent of these grafted juniors would survive, but it would take another two years before these saplings were sufficiently strong to be sold on to farmers, to oleiculturalists. I walked the rows of, quite literally, thousands of minuscule trees within the carefully thermostated conservatories and thought back to the summer Michel and I had made our outing to choose the young trees for our farm. The two hundred youngsters we finally ordered arrived the following spring. Once they had found their places on our hillside, they soon began to fruit, sooner than I had expected, and it is a fact that the drupes produced are larger and more oleaginous than those of the gnarled warriors who have lived on our farm’s inclines for centuries.

  ‘Graft hybridisation is an asexual process. It involves no pollination, no bees, no organic intercourse, only the skills of man. It offers the possibility of creating plant varieties, olive trees in this instance, with improved inherited genes which give the young plants carefully chosen properties. Do we require a tall tree, short tree, sweet fruit, a faster growing plant? The opportunities are endless.’

  I stared silently upon these rows of babies. What, if any, were the moral implications of this form of plant breeding? Where was it leading us? Could these ever more sophisticated methods of propagation help us survive climate changes, save our future? If an olive tree were bred that could withstand drought stress to an even greater degree than the average olive, could such a hybrid save our deserts, reforest the entire Sahara? Could armies of these mass-produced infants halt desertification? Could they turn climate change around? The questions were as numerous as the pots I was gazing upon.