Page:The Olive Its Culture in Theory and Practice.djvu/33

Rh towards the ground, and even touch it, completely covering in the trunk. The bark is of a gray green. The under side of the leaf is a clear white and the upper a smooth dark green with the fibers well marked.

The berry is an inch and a half in height and three quarters of an inch in diameter. It weighs five grams, is a black red in color and is a clingstone. It gives a good oil, but is late in maturing and needs twelve thousand seven hundred degrees of heat, in order to ripen, from the time the flower appears until the olive is ready for the mill. It needs a careful pruning and frequent clearings. The wiser course is to cultivate thoroughly and give the tree fertilizers rather than to prune closely in order to force the sap into the bearing branches.

In Spain it may be said to be the favorite olive, but in some of the northern provinces where the tree is out of its element it gives no fruit at all but only attains a colossal size and hence is classed by the country people as a wild tree. But as we shall proceed to show it has none of the attributes of the wild tree, so far from it that it is one of the "oil press olives," one of the varieties most highly domesticated and cultivated that the world knows.

When olive culture and oil making come to be better understood, where each variety is given the treatment it demands and olives are gathered at the moment best suited for making the oil, we shall probably hear less about the lateness of the Cornicabra in ripening under a California sun.

A medium sized tree with branches that incline towards the ground, and of abundant blossoms. Resists cold and grows steadily in all kinds of soil. This is one of the earliest olives to ripen, gives a good oil in fair quantity, but it is easily detached from the tree, and many berries are lost on this account. It does not produce every year, but is apt to only give a crop every other yearyear. [sic] It needs especial care in pruning, for, although it is prodigal of