This article is about the tree and olive garden breadsticks fruit. For olive oil, see Olive oil. Olive grove”, “Olive tree”, and “Olive wood” redirect here. Distribution map, with Olea europaea subsp.

This article contains Linear B Unicode characters. Also in multiple other languages the word for “oil” ultimately derives from the name of this tree and its fruit. The olive tree, Olea europaea, is an evergreen tree or shrub native to Mediterranean Europe, Asia, and Africa. The trunk is typically gnarled and twisted. The small, white, feathery flowers, with ten-cleft calyx and corolla, two stamens, and bifid stigma, are borne generally on the previous year’s wood, in racemes springing from the axils of the leaves.

Olives are harvested in the green to purple stage. Olea europaea contains a pyrena commonly referred to in American English as a “pit”, and in British English as a “stone”. The subspecies europaea is divided into two varieties, the europaea, which was formerly named Olea sativa, with the seedlings called “olivasters”, and silvestris, which corresponds to the old wildly growing Mediterranean species Olea oleaster, with the seedlings called “oleasters”. Wild-growing forms of the olive are sometimes treated as the species Olea oleaster, or “oleaster.

Hundreds of cultivars of the olive tree are known. An olive’s cultivar has a significant impact on its color, size, shape, and growth characteristics, as well as the qualities of olive oil. Since many olive cultivars are self-sterile or nearly so, they are generally planted in pairs with a single primary cultivar and a secondary cultivar selected for its ability to fertilize the primary one. In recent times, efforts have been directed at producing hybrid cultivars with qualities useful to farmers, such as resistance to disease, quick growth, and larger or more consistent crops.

40 million years ago in the Oligocene, in what is now corresponding to Italy and the eastern Mediterranean Basin. For thousands of years olives were grown primarily for lamp oil, with little regard for culinary flavor. Its origin can be traced to the Levant based on written tablets, olive pits, and wood fragments found in ancient tombs. The ancestry of the cultivated olive is unknown. Fossil olea pollen has been found in Macedonia and other places around the Mediterranean, indicating that this genus is an original element of the Mediterranean flora. Olives are not native to the Americas.

Spanish colonists brought the olive to the New World, where its cultivation prospered in present-day Peru, Chile, and Argentina. The first seedlings from Spain were planted in Lima by Antonio de Rivera in 1560. In Japan, the first successful planting of olive trees happened in 1908 on Shodo Island, which became the cradle of olive cultivation in Japan. Olive oil has long been considered sacred and holy. The olive branch has often been a symbol of abundance, glory, and peace.