Take a Bough
If you have one spot for a tree in your garden, make it an olive. Especially if the spot is sunny and your house, like the tree, has Mediterranean accents, such as a tile roof or stucco walls. Those plain walls and the olive’s lacy leaves--green on top, silver below--were made for each other.
Symbolically, peace, glory, riches and strength all flow from the olive. A white dove brought Noah a post-flood olive branch. The ancient Greeks believed their gods were born under the tree’s boughs. Romans crowned soldiers with its leaves. Egyptians tucked some in Tut’s tomb. More recently and closer to home, Thomas Jefferson called olive trees “the richest gift of heaven.”
And they’re particularly happy in Southern California. Our cool, wettish winters and hot, dry summers are a close match with their native Mediterranean climate. But while olive trees have flourished in Spain, Italy and Greece for thousands of years, they’ve been in California only centuries. Brought north from Mexico by Franciscan padres in the 1700s, they were an important crop for the missions, which primarily used the oil for lamps and cooking, and became one for other California farmers in the late 1800s. California is still the only significant U.S. source for olives, producing more than 100,000 tons per year, most of which wind up in cans.
A major portion of the state’s olive crop comes from northern and central California. Colder winters there provide more of the chilling time the trees need to set fruit, says Fred Adams, owner of the Adams Olive Ranch in Lindsay, near Visalia. Without adequate chill, trees produce less heavily and less reliably. But this is more a farmer’s than a gardener’s concern, as most people aren’t interested in going through the process of curing the olives so that they can be eaten. If you let olives stay on the tree, they will eventually drop and their juices stain any surface they fall onto. So most of us might prefer they didn’t bear fruit.
There are, in fact, fruitless olives, bred for landscape use, though they aren’t always reliably barren. Hormone sprays, applied at flowering time, can put a stop to fruit development, and selective pruning of fruiting branches can reduce it. Or you can plant the tree as the Italians might, surrounded by bare earth on which the fruit can drop and gather like jewels.
If you want fruit, understand that your harvest will vary from year to year, depending on the severity of winter. As to which varieties are best, Adams, a fourth-generation olive farmer whose family has been in the business more than 100 years, recommends the sprawling ‘Manzanillo,’ which produces large olives you can pick without a ladder. If you want a tall tree, he suggests planting a ‘Mission,’ which has smaller, though quite flavorful, fruit. And be on the lookout, he cautions, for the olive fruit fly, the tree’s current nemesis. This pest bores into and ruins fruit but can be controlled by hanging sticky traps, an organic alternative to poisons.
If your garden lacks space for a mature tree, you can grow olives as a hedge, planting a dwarf type called ‘Little Ollie’ that forms a plump cloud of green with all the sparkle of its bigger cousins.
Large or small, these plants aren’t picky about soil, as long as it’s well drained. Italian folk wisdom holds that sun, stone, drought, silence and solitude are what make an olive tree thrive. Faster, more luxuriant growth will follow if you feed it.
