l, which must be of great age. It is at least 30ft.
high, against a south wall, and has a trunk of large girth; but I never
saw it fruit or flower in England until this year (1877), when the Olive
in my own garden flowered, but did not bear fruit. Miller records trees
at Campden House, Kensington, which, in 1719, produced a good number of
fruit large enough for pickling, and other instances have been recorded
lately. Perhaps if more attention were paid to the grafting, fruit would
follow. The Olive has the curious property that it seems to be a matter
of indifference whether, as with other fruit, the cultivated sort is
grafted on the wild one, or the wild on the cultivated one; the latter
plan was certainly sometimes the custom among the Greeks and Romans, as
we know from St. Paul (Romans xi. 16-25) and other writers, and it is
sometimes the custom now. There are a great number of varieties of the
cultivated Olive, as of other cultivated fruit.

One reason why the Olive is not more grown as a garden tree is that it
is a tree very little admired by most travellers. Yet this is entirely a
matter of taste, and some of the greatest authorities are loud in its
praises as a picturesque tree. One short extract from Ruskin's account
of the tree will suffice, though the whole description is well worth
reading. "The Olive," he says, "is one of the most characteristic and
beautiful features of all southern scenery. . . . What the Elm and the
Oak are to England, the Olive is to Italy. . . . It had been well for
painters to have felt and seen the Olive tree, to have loved it for
Christ's sake; . . . to have loved it even to the hoary dimness of its
delicate foliage, subdued and faint of hue, as if the ashes of the
Gethsemane agony had been cast upon it for ever; and to have traced line
by line the gnarled writhing of its intricate branches, and the pointed
fretwork of its light and narrow leaves, inlaid on the blue field of the
sky, and the small, rosy-white stars of its spring blossoming, and the
heads of sable fruit scattered by autumn along its topmost boughs--the
right, in Israel, of the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow--and,
more than all, the softness of the mantle, silver-grey, and tender, like
the down on a bird's breast, with which far away it veils the undulation
of the mountains."--_Stones of Venice_, vol. iii. p. 176.

FOOTNOTES:

[186:1] _See_ Spenser's account of the first introduction of the Olive
in "Muiop