Olive

Luise Begas-Parmentier: Under Olive trees in a Park in Taormina

The fruit of the olive tree are called olives.

The Olive (Olea Europœa) is a small trees in the family Oleaceae, native to the coastal areas of the eastern Mediterranean Basin (the adjoining coastal areas of southeastern Europe, western Asia and northern Africa) as well as northern Iran at the south end of the Caspian Sea. Its fruit, also called the olive, is of major agricultural importance in the Mediterranean region as the source of olive oil. The tree and its fruit give its name to the plant family, and several languages derive their word for 'oil' from the name of this tree and its fruit.

Quotes

• A crown of olives on his helm he had,
  As if in peace and war he were adrad.
  • Robert Greene, A Maiden’s Dream (1591), st. 4

• See there the olive grove of Academe,
  Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird
  Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long.
  • John Milton, Paradise Regained (1671), Book IV, line 244.

• My club, a beetling olive's stalwart trunk
  And shapely, still environed in its bark:
  This hand had torn from holiest Helicon
  The tree entire, with all its fibrous roots.
  • Theocritus, Idyll XXV, "Heracles the Lion Slayer", as translated by C. S. Calverley (1869)

• O that I were lying under the olives,
  Lying alone among the anemones!
  Shell-colour’d blossoms they bloom there and scarlet,
  Far under stretches of silver woodland,
  Flame in the delicate shade of the olives.
  • Margaret Louisa Woods, "March Thoughts from England", st. 1