Last week, my wife and I took a stroll in Old Orchard park and she was beside herself with happiness that all of the olive trees there were in full bloom, with thick, hard olives hanging off a dozen or more trees.
Naturally she had me (Jeffrey the Giraffe she calls me) pluck a few olives and even grab a loose branch or two so that she can produce home made olive oil. Here’s part of our haul:
My wife is not the first to appreciate olive trees, nor am I the first to steel from them. Olive trees and the fruit they produce have been cultivated and appreciated by man for 7,000 years according to Wikipedia. We use the fruit of the olive tree to make olive oil, and it’s no exaggeration to say that wars have been fought to secure land favorable for olive tree growth.
The Bible mentions olive trees dozens of times, and olive oil is thought of as sacred. We use it to “annoint” people and, in the Catholic tradition, send them off to meet their maker. In Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather,” a young Don Vito Corleone’s first business (legitimate or otherwise) is the Genco Olive Oil Import Company. In ancient Greece, triumphant armies and victorious warriors and fighters were crowned with wreaths of olives. War and peace symbolism extend even further: when people write of making peace, they say one side is extending the “olive branch” to the other.
The SCV, with its semi-arid, Mediterranean climate, probably would have made a wonderful place to grow olive trees. Had our community existed in the time and place of Greek nation-states, we would likely have been very wealthy indeed, and one can imagine the floor of the valley covered in row upon row of coveted olive trees. That’s something to think a bout the next time you stroll through a local park or along a paseo in the spring and see loose olives scattered everywhere.
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