The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2)

by Carol Drinkwater

  Italy produces 1.5 million grafted trees a year. They are the leaders in the industry.

  In Spain, according to these southern Italian propagation and disease specialists, all new olive orchards were grown from branch cuttings sown directly into earth. The roots that are produced from cuttings are shallower in the early years and not drought resistant so they need to be regularly irrigated, which is a very heavy burden on water resources. Plants that were self-seeded from stones, transported by nature or birds, for example, also needed more water because they, too, are shallow-rooted.

  Later, when I reached Tuscany, I was told that trees grown from stones or cuttings take fifteen years to produce fruits whereas the grafted plants can yield within eight years. The growth cycle could be halved.

  Here in Puglia every new orchard was planted up with grafted trees. Here, it had always been the tradition. It was vital in a region where lack of water was a critical issue. The root systems on grafted trees burrow much deeper and produce one, even two, extra long taproots that seek out deeper levels of moisture.

  ‘Water conservation. The Romans grew from grafted plants. They understood the root systems.’

  For a self-taught olive farmer such as myself, this was all new material. I had walked into the science of olive farming and it was causing me to reflect. I had been seeking history and an alternative method of combating the olive fly. Other than our escalating water bills, due to the excessively hot recent summers, I had not given these irrigation issues a thought. And I had never considered the looming possibility of a waterless world.

  This trilby-hatted owner of the conservatory had been responsible for transforming Nat’s Roman sprigs from Malta into healthy young, fruit-bearing trees. I congratulated him and asked him whether, during the process of working with cuttings from trees that were 2000 years old, he had found any difference. He shook his head.

  Had he encountered any difficulties?

  Yes, the Maltese Romans had not been pruned in decades, perhaps a century, so the best young shoots were sprouting right at the very top of the trees. Accessing them was no easy feat. Beyond that, transporting them from Malta across the foot of Italy without damaging them, had been a challenge for Nat.

  How had this specialist chosen the stone, the mother variety, the rootstock, to marry with the Roman scions?

  He had undertaken a long search for a progenitor, contacting colleagues all across Europe. Eventually, a variety of tree almost identical to the old Roman groves had been found growing in Turkey. From these trees, he had taken the fruit, the stone, which became the rootstock.

  Towards the end of my stay, Dora sent a message inviting me to her offices, a block of converted warehouses including massive storerooms where her oil for export was sealed and packed. Up a winding staircase to the atelier, her laboratories and modern, well-equipped offices. Dora, mother of two tiny children, was a slender, dark-haired, pretty woman, poised, discerning, to the point. This couple welcomed me into their home, a high-ceilinged, postmodern flat that covered the first floor of two adjoining town houses owned by her parents. It was bright, with delightfully imaginative furnishings and fixtures and clinically pristine, as I might have expected from two scientists whose families had considerable land and wealth. Dora cooked delicious pastas, made crunchy salads and I brought wine purchased from a supermarket in the new town not far from my faceless, perfunctory hotel. A wasted exercise when I learned that her parents owned substantial vineyards. Afterwards, out on the spacious, marbled terrace cluttered with the children’s toys, we sipped home-made basil liqueur in the spring sunshine. Another speciality of the region, which Dora had run out of, was a laurel liqueur.

  On my final day, before I set off, Dora presented me with a crate of her olive oil, a dozen bottles. I was embarrassed. It was too generous and the boot of the hire car was already tightly packed. I had nothing to offer in return so I took out the award-winning bottle from old Sicilian Bernardo and gave it to my kind hosts, warning them that God probably accompanied it.

  Car packed, a last glass of basil liqueur together on their terrace, I took photographs to send back to them and we said our farewells. Then I set off again with Francisco for our final outing. My last hour with him, possibly the most fruitful, revealed the poet within the scientist. He took me to fifteen hectares of exquisite, immaculately cared-for olive groves, romantically situated on a slight incline with views back towards the Murge Hills.

  ‘Here is my personal project,’ he confided a little shyly. ‘It is an organic grove. I am working here with many of my ideas. For example, instead of feeding the soil with fertilisers or nitrogen, at the onset of winter I am going to sow chickpea seeds. I will leave them till spring. Once they have flowered and seeded, I will turn the earth. The seeds in the soil will regrow the following year and generate natural nitrogen. The variety to buy is not the edible chickpea but another used for animal feed.’

  ‘I have been trying unsuccessfully to run our farm organically but the olive fly defeats us.’

  My companion talked of how he combated our pest with a copper-based solution, though he admitted the insect was less destructive, less invasive in this part of southern Italy. ‘We have a lower level of humidity.’

  Our farm, Appassionata, closer to the coast offered ideal conditions for the fly.

  ‘Keep the ground clean, leave no stray olives on the earth after harvest. The fly infiltrates them and resides within them until summer.’

  The mid-afternoon was perfectly still. We strolled and circled the trees, admiring them, brushing our fingers gently against their white lacy flowers in full blossom, remarking bees nectar-gathering on a profusion of poppies, dandelions and clovers flowering in the fields. There was no irrigation used here, only rainfall fed these fields.

  ‘Water is becoming the most coveted, expensive commodity on earth. And as the earth gets hotter and soil degenerates, we will look to the olive tree. It has several fascinating methods of preserving itself during drought-stressed periods.’

  ‘For example?’

  ‘Do you know why the underside of the olive leaf is silver?’

  I was rather ashamed to admit that I had never asked myself the question.

  ‘The leaf is covered in tiny, all but invisible hairs. They attract sunlight and turn its underside silver while the upper remains greenish. The function of these hairs is to reflect sunlight and regulate the evaporation of water. The olive tree transpires through its leaves. Remarkably, it has a shoot-to-root signal, a message service between the roots and the leaves, alerting leaves of the need to decrease transpiration, protecting against water loss. And it is in direct relation to the lack of water in the soil.’

  A man with a dog and wooden walking stick passed by at the extremity of the lane. He threw a wave with his cane when he spotted us.

  ‘But there is something else.’

  A pair of butterflies in love-play fluttered by.

  ‘The olive tree not only conserves water, it has the ability to create it.’

  ‘How can that be?’

  ‘Put crudely, the olive root burrows deep for water, which is why over-irrigation damages the long-term health of the plant. While excavating, the root creates channels that allow rain to seep into the soil and infiltrate groundwater levels, thus regenerating underground water deposits. With the work of the olive root, it is possible to remedy desiccated soil conditions. Sow olive groves in the desert, feed them prudently and they will, over generations, reclaim the terrain. It is a remarkably resourceful tree.’

  I recollected the Roman mill lost at the high doors to the Sahara and my twin visions for the future.

  ‘These groves are not mine; they belong to my uncle,’ Francisco added a little wistfully. ‘But I am the one who is always here. Let us walk, we can see his summer palace.’

  We traced the contours of the lane, until we stood outside imposing, ornate gates and stared through the bars like children towards a rather overgrown driveway and beyond a ma
gnificent eighteenth-century property. Out of season, not even a gardener or guardian cared for it. ‘When I am not studying diseases, I like best of all to be here, walking these orchards, sitting in the summer palace gardens reading, thinking up schemes to lend nature a hand.’

  *

  On my solitary Saturday way, once through legions of pugliesi olive groves, I crossed the narrow ankle of Italy, through undulating, soft-toned countryside that seemed at peace with the world, but who could say? Beyond the quietude of the early evening and the glorious peach-ripe sunset ahead of me, I was unprepared for the cut-and-thrust onslaught on the outskirts of Naples, once the capital of the Bourbon Kingdom. I lost my way in and around terminally decrepit backstreets where lean-faced fixers, messengers, pimps, busy with petty missions ran to and fro or stood on street corners smoking. I got caught up in a yellow and blue flagged municipal street party of drums, gunshots, drunks and traffic jams and arrived into Pompeii, frazzled, at close to midnight with nowhere to sleep. Eventually, I found what I was told was ‘the last room in the town’. No doubt, an exaggeration.

  The sun had risen on a beautiful day, filling in the spaces between the charred stones with a kindly, diffused light, as it must have done on that mid-summer morning almost 2000 years ago, August AD 79, when the people of this Amalfi coast city awoke, oblivious to their gruesome fate. Pompeii. Such a living and dead place! So many sweet scents and perfumes and delicate living touches pervading a city perished, a charcoaled image of itself. I sat within an olive grove planted with twentieth-century trees beside a fountain whose water stopped flowing 2000 years ago. There were a couple of fresh-leafed apple trees in blossom, too, while, not twenty yards away, laid out in a glass case, were several small, frozen bodies: terrified citizens attempting an escape from the streets flowing with red-hot larva, faces pressed against the ground, faces shoved into another’s long-rotted flesh, incredulous at what was befalling them, caught up in the stampede while overhead the black, billowing clouds cloaked the sky, plunging them into a darkness darker than any night. Stiff, brittle corpses, a diary of a day, a record of nature’s monstrous capabilities.

  Alongside, tender young petals.

  And then I sniffed a lingering, sulphurous aroma. Burning. At first I thought it was my imagination playing tricks on me, but it never relented, never let up. It was possibly caused by the continuing gunshots or perhaps fireworks, elsewhere. I heard the cracks throughout my day at Pompeii, reaching crescendos every couple of hours, but I did not see anything. They must have been an accompaniment to whatever the neighbouring civic celebrations were in honour of. I found it freaky, as though the stones told their story and the perfumes in the air, too, had never let go. At Porta de Nola, I sat in the shade and listened to crows, blackbirds and small songbirds. I overheard an American ask her husband: ‘Did they serve pizza and beer back then?’ The air was perfumed with flowers but it was also tinged with a damp, decaying odour. I heard in the distance a train passing, a horse neighing and cantering, and then it was back to the lacklustre stones. Time present, time past.

  I walked the ruins for nine hours, always shadowed by the threatening silhouette of Vesuvius, which had given no warnings that day, that afternoon, 2000 years ago, of the fire in its throat ready to roar, ready to blow its top.

  Modern Pompeii was an altogether different proposition. No ghosts here, just the flesh and blood shove of armies of hawkers and tourists, the eternal union, and flocks of nuns parading the streets like penguins, and the incessant pealing of church bells. I was exhausted, drained after the blackened city, but was bucked up when, sitting drinking a well-earned cappuccino, I observed three whiskery biddies, fat as butter, dawdling in the square eating crumbling pastries out of paper tissues. They were whispering conspiratorially, throwing glances at an imposing door with a large brass knocker. Gingerly, one of the old girls eased herself up to the door, rapped hard with the knocker and then the trio hot-footed it out of the square, lickety-split, like naughty children, giggling. That evening, I ate dinner in an osteria where the paunched but kindly Neapolitan proprietor reminded me that Vesuvius still boils at its centre and, unlike gently smoking Etna, according to him, it could erupt at any moment without warning.

  I made a brief stop on the coast at Positano, because I wanted to, because I had not visited it since I had lived fleetingly, intermittently, in Rome in my twenties and because I needed to take stock, to log in my head the many images of the Mezzogiorno before I left. Positano had been a fishing village until the sixties when the hippy chic discovered it. Potted hydrangeas, all blue, lined the marble stairway at the entrance to my hotel that looked out across the steep cliffside to the sea, and the balconies were overhung with scarlet flowering geraniums. Fruits were in season: freckled apricots, egg-shaped tomatoes, medlars. Packed tight in wooden boxes, like the poor relative of an apricot, I knew this fruit, its dark-leaved tree, from home. It grows in every garden in the South of France though we don’t have one. Whenever I have asked I was told, nèfle from the tree, néflier. Here in Italy it was nespola, but I had never known the English name before.

  ‘Best eaten when the skin has wrinkled and become patched with brown,’ the old woman in the shop across from my hotel advised. And lemons, remarkably knobbly, thick-skinned lemons the size of melons, served with every dish.

  ‘The Mediterranean dream of earth’s plenty and the quiet satisfaction of those who gather and live this life is an illusion. It is hard,’ said Domenico, an olive-farming waiter whose family had one hundred trees on one hundred and twenty ragged hillside acres close to nearby Praiano, the fruits of which they pressed at a granite-stone mill in Sorrento. Yes, it was hard, but he would never sell. ‘The olive trees are our currency.’ His father had been a farmer-fisherman, like so many here. They grew tomatoes, potatoes and olives and he fished. Since his father died two years earlier, Domenico had taken over the responsibility for the groves, pressing sufficient oil for his three brothers, two sisters and their families. During the last war when his father had been posted in Taranto and then sent overseas to Ethiopia, his mother had run the farm single-handed with a little assistance from the very small sons. But tourism had changed the fortunes of these Mezzogiorno natives.

  ‘We live within the shadows of volcanoes, one foot in Europe and the other in Africa, but the tourists love it and they pay handsomely. Further south in Calabria, they are less fortunate. Their oil is poor, too.’

  I walked to the beach with an armful of books, sunk my feet in the sand and settled. Instantly it began to rain, wildly, throwing up deckchairs as though they were of papier-mâché. Spring storms. They were thrilling. I watched them through the windows of cafés and I whiled away the evenings in a bar listening to a Neapolitan tenor sing his heart out; Neapolitan melodies. ‘O Sole Mio’.

  People lived here; they did not exist. Their lives were lived in, inhabited with an intensity which reached right into the marrow of their bones. Still, it was time to move on to Sardegna, then north. Time to whisper arrivederci to this sunburned elsewhere. The days to my rendezvous with Michel in Milan were lessening, and to the meeting I had scheduled with another propagator, in Tuscany, land of sweet oil and the mother tongue of the Italian language. I dawdled along the coast because it was too glorious to race through, stopping at every second roadside spot that commanded views down upon the distant emerald-blue sea, wanting to dive from the belvederes, lingeringly. Passing through Campania, where the first water buffalo were bred for the ploughing of the fields, I avoided Rome because it is insane. It invades. Rome is impossible simply to pass through or overnight. Rome demands attention, Rome demands commitment. Its lived-in, dense, eternally decadent past and its frenetic, cracked-at-the-vocal-chords, modernistic energy reaches subtly into the core of you, lusts after you, seduces and insists with a stroke of the tongue that you stay. Vieni qua, vieni qua. I knew it. I had lived there. I knew, too, that if I sailed in there was an old story – Babingtons, two rooftop terraces overlooking the Spanish
Steps, Cinecittà, Trastevere, the banks of the Tiber – a young love story in an antique city that I would want to haunt. I suddenly recollected his black eyes; cocaine highs; his shy silences. It remained a wound, a desire that still occasionally stung bitter-sweet, so I turned the wheel north-west and my thoughts, away from a man who had long preceded Michel, bypassing Roma, and took the starlit ferry from fortressed Civita Vecchia to Olbia. Penultimate stop, Sardegna.

  SARDEGNA AND NORTHERN ITALY

  Sardinia, Sardegna, took me by surprise. Had I said the same of Sicily? Two islands both with autonomy, both Italian, both dealing in the euro currency yet worlds apart. Sardinia took me over, almost as soon as I drove off the boat. I disembarked into the port of Olbia soon after dawn, intent upon Santa Teresa de Gallura at the very northern tip of the island where the ferries departed for Corsica. Corsica! I was nearly home. This was my fifth month on the road. I had not been paying attention to time. But now that I had paused to consider the date for the first time in a while, I realised that I had missed Michel’s birthday. I called him but the phone was switched off. He was probably working outside somewhere on the land. My head was a rush, a flood of olive farm images. Images that I had kept aside in one of the trunks in my mind. It did not do to allow my thoughts to wander home too frequently because it made me aware of my aloneness, my loneliness, whereas, when I stayed in the present, I was perfectly content, excited by my journeyings and the discoveries along the way.

  It was not yet 8 a.m. when I took a right turn off the Olbia highway. I had not eaten breakfast and was in need of a cup of coffee. I followed the shoreline hoping to discover a beachside shack and found myself at the sea’s edge passing by a chic yachting resort along the Costa Smeralda. During the sixties and seventies, this whole area was developed by a consortium of businessmen headed by Prince Karim Aga Khan IV, stepson of the late Rita Hayworth. Film star and heroine of mine, Ms Hayworth was Karim’s father’s second wife. She was pregnant with their only child, a daughter, Yasmin, when Aly Aga Khan married her in the South of France in May 1949. The marriage lasted two years, but Rita stayed on in the Alpes-Maritimes and lived out her later, lost years in a village not too far from our farm.