Throughout Europe and Asia are many old olive trees, some of them producing abundantly, their origin, however, lost in remote centuries. The olive is very tenacious of life, but the methods of cultivation, which tend to increase production, reduce resistance and diminish its duration of life.
The generic name _Olea_ is from the Greek _elaia_, derived from the Celtic or Gothic _olew_, oil, on account of the abundance of oil in the fruit. The specific name _europaea_ is given to the species cultivated throughout Europe.
The olive has been given fanciful names by the early peoples. It was known as the “tree of wisdom,” “Minerva’s tree,” the “Gift of Heaven,” etc. The Greeks consecrated the tree to Minerva, and made it the symbol of wisdom, abundance, and peace.
The olive is an evergreen tree about 20 to 30 feet high, much branched and spreading. It forms a symmetrical head, having angular branches and opposite leaves. The leaves are dry and leathery in texture, lanceolate, entire, deep green above, and light hoary beneath. The flowers are small, star-shaped, creamy white with yellow centers, have a faint pleasing odor, and are axillary in compact racemes. The fruit, a fleshy pendulous drupe, is very abundant. It is oval, obovate, or globular in shape, about the size of a pigeon’s egg, dull greenish yellow even when full size but unripe, then gradually becomes yellow, red, and finally turns a glossy purplish black or black when ripe. In ripening, the side exposed to the sun reddens, then gradually the whole fruit changes from red to purple, then black. As fruit of all degrees of ripeness are developed at the same time, the tree furnishes an extremely beautiful combination of colors, the various greens of the leaf and fruits forming a background for the splotches of red, purple, and black formed by the ripening fruit. The fruit is peculiar in two respects, first, in that it contains in addition to the ordinary constituents of fruits an abundance of edible oil, consequently making it a valuable food; second in that it contains a bitter substance which does not disappear on maturity, so that the fruit cannot be eaten at any stage in its development without preliminary treatment for the elimination of this substance. The stone is two-celled, many times only one seed developing.