Olea oleaster

Olea oleaster, the wild-olive, has been considered by various botanists a valid species and a subspecies of the cultivated olive tree, Olea europea, which is a tree of multiple origins that was domesticated, it now appears, at various places during the fourth and third millennia BCE, in selections drawn from varying local populations. The wild-olive (Ancient Greek kotinos), which ancient Greeks distinguished from the cultivated olive tree (Ancient Greek ἐλάα), was used to fashion the olive wreath awarded victors at the ancient Olympic games. The ancient and sacred wild-olive tree of Olympia stood near the Temple of Zeus, patron of the games. Today, as a result of natural hybridization and the very ancient domestication and extensive cultivation of the olive throughout the Mediterranean Basin, wild-looking feral forms of olive, called 'oleasters', constitute a complex of populations, potentially ranging from feral forms to the wild-olive. The wild-olive is a tree of the maquis shrubland, itself in part the result of the long presence of mankind. The drought-tolerant sclerophyllous tree is believed to have originated in the eastern Mediterranean Basin. It still provides the hardy and disease-resistant rootstock on which cultivated olive varieties are grafted. Literate Greeks recalled that the culture hero Aristaeus, originator of the arts of bee-keeping, cheese-making and other innovations of the most distant past, was he who 'first pressed the fruit of the oily wild-olive.' In Odyssey Book V, when shipwrecked Odysseus has been cast ashore, he finds a wild-olive that has grown together with a bearing one— inosculated, an arborist would say— on the Scherian seashore, where he crawled In the fourth century BCE Theophrastus, the most prominent pupil of Aristotle, wrote an Enquiry into Plants that stands at the head of the literary tradition of botany. Modern botanists often struggle to identify the plants named and described by Theophrastus, and modern naming conventions often make spurious links. An example is the modern genus Cotinus, which, though named after the ancient Greek kotinos, is unrelated to the wild-olive. Theophrastus noted the kinship of wild-olive with the cultivated olive, but his correspondents informed him that no amount of pruning and transplanting could transform kotinos into olea. Through lack of cultivation, he knew, some cultivated forms of olive, pear or fig might run wild, but in the 'rare' case where wild-olive was spontaneously transformed to a fruit-bearing one, it was to be classed among portents. He noted that wild kinds, such as wild pears and the wild-olive tended to bear more fruits than cultivated trees, though of inferior quality, but that if a wild-olive was topped it might bear a larger quantity of its inedible fruits. He noted that the leaf-buds were opposite. Timber of the wild-olive was valued: it was proof against decay, and was not affected by shipworm, which was a valuable feature in shipbuilding. It also provided stout handles for carpenters' tools.