Page:A Practical Treatise on Olive Culture, Oil Making and Olive Pickling.djvu/30

 olive trees that are never pruned and receive no care whatever.

It is thus that we read in Dr. Thomson^s "The Land and The Book:"

"This tree requires but little labor or care of any kind, and, if long neglected, will revive again when the ground is dug or ploughed, and begin afresh to yield as before. Vineyards forsaken die out almost immediately; and mulberry orchards neglected run rapidly to ruin; but not so the olive. I saw the desolate hills of Jebel-El-Alah, above Antioch, covered with these groves, although no one had paid attention to them for half a century. Large trees, in a good season, will yield from ten to fifteen gallons of oil. No wonder it is so highly prized."

Reynaud tells us that in the south of France the olive tree gives abundant product without the effort of a careful and costly cultivation. "Which is the tree," says he, "which, like it, demands so little care, so little cultivating, so little manuring!"

Other modern writers, on the contrary, insist that the olive tree should be carefully worked, pruned and manured.

Between these two extreme views it is well to allow ourselves to be guided, to a certain extent, by the experience of past generations, which is often transmitted to us under the form of proverbs. It is thus that we have been cradled in our younger days by such old sayings as: "An olive tree requires a wise man at its foot and a