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Olive tree history was not what I had in mind when this autumn’s prune-back cuttings arrived on my table. I was looking at the leaves. Each one is olive-green on top and silver underneath, and a turn of a few degrees changes its colour. That double face makes the branch hard to draw. It also sent me looking for how one tree came to define a whole sea.
TL;DRThe olive was first deliberately planted about 7,000 years ago at Tel Tsaf in the Jordan Valley, alongside the fig. Oil, trade and myth then carried Olea europaea to every Mediterranean shore, and Spanish settlers later took it to the Americas.
Key Facts
Olive tree history begins with a wild shrub
The olive’s wild ancestor is the oleaster, a scrubby and often spiny tree of Mediterranean hillsides. Its fruit is small and its stone is large. Kew’s Plants of the World Online records the cultivated olive as Olea europaea subsp. europaea. People were gathering wild olives long before anyone planted one.
Olive tree history, in the strict sense of a tree planted on purpose, starts at Tel Tsaf. This village in the Jordan Valley was lived in between about 7,200 and 6,700 years ago. Olives do not grow wild there. So when archaeobotanists identified charred olive wood in the village hearths, they read it as a tree somebody had planted. The same charcoal held fig wood, so the fig is the olive’s oldest companion in cultivation.
A planted olive gives nothing for its first few years. Only a settled community can wait that long for a harvest. The difference between the wild tree and the cultivated one is visible in the leaf. The oleaster’s leaf is shorter and blunter. On the studio’s olive branch plate, the cultivated leaf runs long and narrow, tapering at both ends.
Oil, lamps and the Bronze Age sea
The next chapter of olive tree history was written in oil. Pressed olives gave food, lamp fuel, skin oil and a base for perfume. Sealed in jars, the oil kept for months and could be shipped. By the Bronze Age, Minoan Crete was storing it in palace magazines. Clerks at Knossos, and later at Pylos, recorded oil in Linear B, the earliest written Greek. Phoenician merchants then helped carry the tree and its oil west, towards North Africa and Spain.
The olive followed the sea because the sea was how oil travelled. Groves clustered near coasts and ports, where the climate suited the tree and the amphorae could be loaded. The lemon made a similar crossing many centuries later, as I traced in the history of the lemon.
Climate set the outer limit. The olive needs long dry summers and mild winters. Its range came to mark the edge of the Mediterranean climate itself, and geographers still use the tree as a rough boundary for the region. That is the sense in which one tree defined a sea.
Athena, peace and the olive branch
No part of olive tree history is better known than the Athenian myth. Athena and Poseidon competed to become the city’s patron. Poseidon struck the rock of the Acropolis and brought up salt water. Athena planted an olive, and the citizens judged hers the more useful gift. A sacred olive grew on the Acropolis in historical times. Oil from Athena’s sacred trees filled the prize amphorae of the Panathenaic Games.
The branch carried a second meaning. In Genesis, the dove returns to the ark with an olive leaf, a sign that the waters had gone down. Greek and Roman suppliants carried olive branches to show they came without hostile intent. That custom runs straight to the modern phrase “to offer an olive branch”. The symbol works because the tree takes years to bear. Nobody plants an olive on land they expect to lose.
How the olive reached Italy and beyond
Olive tree history in Italy starts late. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, repeated an older claim that Italy had no olives around 600 BC. Greek colonists in the south and the expanding Roman state changed that within a few centuries. Rome planted groves across its provinces, and southern Spain became one of its great oil suppliers.
The Greek physician Dioscorides described olive oil and its medical uses in the same century as Pliny. His text was copied for well over a thousand years and shaped the medieval herbals that followed it.
The tree also pushed north wherever a lake or a coast softened the winter. Lake Como sits at a latitude normally too cold for olives. Even so, the water stores enough summer heat to protect groves on its shores, and their oil carries its own protected designation, Laghi Lombardi Lario.
Spanish settlers took olives to the Americas in the sixteenth century. Franciscan missions planted them in California in the late eighteenth. Spain remains the world’s largest producer today, which makes it the latest chapter in olive tree history.
Drawing the Olive
This autumn I worked from prune-back cuttings: woody twigs with the leaves set in opposite pairs at each node. The node is the part most drawings get wrong. Two leaves leave the twig at exactly the same height, and the next pair turns a quarter-turn round the stem.
Colour is the harder problem. The topside is a true olive-green, while the underside is silvered with tiny scales. I built the leaves up in cool grey-green glazes, so the silver reads as reflected light rather than as a flat grey. The flowers are deliberately absent. An olive blooms in late spring, and an autumn branch carries fruit instead.
The plate is a hand-drawn digital illustration made from a specimen. The studio’s catalogue holds more than 50 published plates, and Fiurdelin is a member of the Association of Botanical Artists. Seven thousand years of olive tree history come down, on the plate, to a single twig.
Styling Olive Branch Art in Entry Halls
Fine-art print →
An entry hall is read at close range, usually from a metre or two and usually on the move. That suits the olive branch. Its interest lies in the turning leaves, and they reward a passing glance as well as a longer look.
The plate is pale, so the wall behind it matters. On a white wall, a generous mat gives the silver an edge. Clay, warm plaster or a muted sage hold it without help. A 36 × 51 cm (14 × 20 in) frame fits most narrow halls. Hang it with its centre about 150 cm from the floor, in oak or a warm mid-brown rather than black. Where the hall is wider, set the fig and the lemon on either side to complete a Mediterranean three. The same entrance logic, at restaurant scale, is set out in the guide to Mediterranean restaurant art. For a kitchen, see the Mediterranean kitchen wall page.
FAQ
How far back does olive tree history go?
The oldest firm evidence of planting is about 7,000 years old. It comes from charred olive wood at Tel Tsaf in the Jordan Valley, where the tree does not grow wild. People were using wild olives well before that.
Why is the olive branch a symbol of peace?
Two traditions meet in it. In Genesis, a dove brings an olive leaf back to the ark as a sign that the flood is ending. In Greece and Rome, suppliants carried olive branches to show they came in peace.
Why are olive leaves silver underneath?
The underside is covered in tiny shield-shaped scales. They reflect sunlight and slow the loss of water. That helps the tree through long, dry summers, and it gives the branch its shifting grey-green colour in a breeze.
Can olive trees grow outside the Mediterranean?
Yes, wherever winters stay mild and summers stay dry enough. Olives are grown commercially in California, Chile, Australia and South Africa. In northern Italy, the large lakes hold enough warmth for groves on their shores.
How is this botanical art printed and shipped?
The olive branch plate is produced and shipped through the studio’s own print rail at prints.botanical.art. Each print is an archival fine-art giclée on paper or canvas, framed or unframed. It comes in sizes from small prints to over 150 cm (60 inches), and orders ship worldwide.
Bringing the Olive Branch Home
The olive branch belongs on a narrow wall you pass every day, by a front door or at the foot of a stair. It carries seven millennia of olive tree history in one cutting. I drew it for a leaf that never settles between green and silver. The plate is available as a fine-art print, in sizes from small prints to over 150 cm (60 inches). It hangs with the lemon and the fig in the Mediterranean Table collection. Prefer to print it yourself? The digital file is on Etsy.
