The Olive as Place Maker

While most of us likely purchase extra virgin olive oil from our local grocery store, how many of us know what “extra virgin” means? Fortunately, this term is not just a marketing tactic; it reflects the way in which the oil is made from unripe green olives. Extra virgin olive oil is a better tasting and higher quality olive oil because of meticulous taste-testing methods that measure the oil’s bitterness, aroma, and texture. Carrying traces of ancient knowledge, these methods signaled quality long before regulatory standards came about.

Looking beyond the label, we can begin to move from our everyday familiarity with olive oil to its broader historical and cultural significance. Olea europaea has long shaped and been shaped by the built and cultivated landscapes of the Eastern Mediterranean. With archaeological evidence dating back to at least the fifth millennium BCE, the cultivated olive tree first emerged in the Southern Levant.1 While many associate the olive with the Mediterranean diet, its significance goes far beyond just cuisine. Its branch is a universal emblem of peace, its oil fuels lamps that illuminate sacred interiors, its wreaths crown victors, and its groves map entire communities onto their landscapes.

Following the olive tree across time reveals how one plant repeatedly mediated relationships between people and the spaces they inhabited. In Greek myth, the olive tree establishes its roots in narrative, where meaning precedes historicism. In Roman and early Christian contexts, olive oil structures daily rhythms and ritual practices, illuminating interiors and sanctifying bodies. In the modern Mediterranean, olive groves become sites of memory and tension, shaped by heritage, environmental strain, and global markets. Through these transformations, the olive tree remains more than a symbol. It actively participates in the making of place. What might this one plant reveal about how communities in the Eastern Mediterranean have understood their histories and landscapes across time, and how an object of everyday life continued to be an anchor of meaning even as it circulated globally?

Sacred Landscapes: The Olive in Ancient Greece

The olive tree’s story begins with the mythological origins of Athens, the city that grew around the tree. On the Acropolis, a legendary competition unfolded: Poseidon struck the ground to summon a spring of seawater, while Athena gifted the people an olive tree.2 Although one was a grand display of power, the other’s strength lay in its enduring utility. The competition resulted in a clear victor, crowning Athena as the patron goddess of the city. Her gift of the olive tree became a testament to her wisdom and foresight, seen today in the continued presence of olive trees in Athens’ landscape and their ubiquity worldwide.

Homer’s Odyssey offers another moment, though much less well-known, where the olive tree defines the meeting of nature, place, and divinity.3 In Book 13, when Odysseus at last returns to his home in Ithaca, he sees:

At the harbor’s head a branching olive stands
with a welcome cave nearby it, dank with sea-mist,
sacred to nymphs of the springs we call the Naiads.4

The Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry, writing centuries later, saw this detail as more than scenery.5 To him, the cave represented the world, and the olive tree—a symbol of Athena— signified divine thoughtfulness standing just outside the cave. This olive tree stood as a mediator between a higher cosmological order and the human experience. Even without adopting Porphyry’s metaphysics, the image clarifies how the olive tree marks thresholds: between sea and land, mortal and divine, homecoming and exile.

In these early narratives, the olive tree operates as a marker of identity and signals a transition from ordinary landscape to sacred space. Whether planted on the Acropolis or standing near Ithaca’s harbor, the tree anchors myth to geographical place. How then did constant engagement with a plant mediating myth and landscape shape the ancient communities’ daily rituals and participation in these shared sacred spaces?

Civic Groves and Communal Bodies in Antiquity

Beyond just myth, the sacred gift of Athena’s tree extended deep into the civic life of Athens. The Panathenaic Games, held in Athens since 566 BCE, were athletic and cultural competitions accompanied by large scale festivities in honor of Athena.6 Crowds anticipated the major celebrations every four years and the games remained a core part of public life until the fourth century CE. The procession of the festival that ended at the Acropolis transformed the entire landscape of the city and its people into a ritual landscape as seen in the depictions on the Parthenon frieze.7 It involved an unusually large group of people in the city, citizen and foreigner, man and woman, young and old, therefore demonstrating the Games’ capabilities of uniting people and landscape.8

The games’ victors were crowned with olive wreaths and awarded a prized amphora containing oil made from sacred olive trees—a reward that bound personal glory to Athena and to the city.9 In fact, oil made from the sacred olive tree grove of Athens had strict laws to protect the trees from being cut or damaged, including only allowing specific individuals to handle them.10 The games, therefore, were not merely popular festivities, but a major religious event rooted in civic engagement on the foundations of Athens’ heritage and identity. In distributing oil as a prize, the city enacted a subtle form of political power, extending its influence through a gift that traveled back with the victors to their home communities. In this movement beyond the city, olive oil carried religious meaning and economic value while remaining unmistakably “Athenian,”11 becoming a symbol for the ideals of glory, honor, and collective belonging.

The growth and harvest of olives is another example of a collective enterprise. Though slave labor was commonly used in large-scale groves of antiquity, for many villages,12 the olive harvest was a local and communal event, drawing together neighbors, kin, and entire communities. No individual alone could possibly maintain an entire grove, harvest the fruits, crush the olives, and them press them into oil.

Starting with cultivation, the process begins with human intervention. Olive trees usually do not start from the seed, but often with techniques such as grafting—an agricultural practice of antiquity that requires shared knowledge and is widely used today. In ancient Mediterranean agriculture, crown grafting involved inserting a cutting from a cultivated olive tree into the stock of a wild tree (Olea oleaster), binding the two so they grow together and produce fruit suitable for oil and consumption.13 The ancient Greek philosopher and botanist Theophrastos described the process in detail, noting how cultivated olive trees were grafted onto wild stocks to improve yield and quality and to domesticate the wild stocks.14 Through this technique, olive trees were continually renewed: unproductive branches could be removed and replaced with younger ones, extending the life and yield of the tree.15 Given the many years it takes an olive tree to mature even through methods like grafting, planters do so knowing the full benefit belongs to later generations. In this way, olive tree cultivation bound communities not only through shared work, but through a long-term commitment to lineage, place, and collective memory.

Once the biennial fruits were ready, olive harvesting was a coordinated choreography of collective labor. First, cloths were spread at the base of the tree, along with baskets to catch the fruit. Groups of harvesters gathered, some climbing high into the tree’s branches and others on the ground wielding long sticks or rake-like tools, synchronizing their movements to loosen the fruit without damaging the tree. The group moved together from tree to tree, completing each harvest as a unit: a shared experience that depends on collective effort and the transmission of specific skills and knowledge across generations and traditions within sedentary communities.

This experience is mirrored in the tree itself. The olive tree’s extraordinary longevity allows it to serve as a living history, bearing witness to the lives and labors of countless generations.16 As the Roman agronomist Columella observed,

If it is neglected for many years, it does not deteriorate like the vine, but even during this period it nevertheless offers something to the head of the household and, when it is cultivated again, it recovers in a single year.17

From Grove to Table

From grove to table, the olive tree structured the labor of harvest as well as the reward in the feast. Olives (and the oil), wine, and grain, long considered the triad of the Eastern Mediterranean from antiquity to today, formed the basis of daily consumption. As seen in Hippocratic texts dating to the late fifth century BC, proper eating became a daily practice of harmony: one selected foods not just for taste, but for their ability to restore balance and promote both physical and spiritual well-being.18 While olive oil was especially prized for its medicinal properties, religious use, and versatility, what about the act of eating the fruit itself?

In ancient Greek society, the table was a place where the boundaries between the individual and the community, the private and the public sphere, were continually shaped and reinforced. Dining was never an isolated, private affair. “Yet it is not possible to discover a way for the body to attain a pleasure more justifiable than that which comes from eating and drinking… and [sharing] together banquets and tables,” wrote Plutarch in his Moralia, capturing the belief that to share food was to share identity.19 Banqueting and ritual feasting, whether at a symposium, a religious festival, or a civic gathering, were central moments of public life and a stage for social exchange. Scholars claim that to be invited to the table was to be included, to belong. Exclusion from communal eating meant a form of social isolation.20 In fact, dining and matters of cuisine go so far as framing ancient conceptions of the “civilized.”

In ancient society, a clear dichotomy has emerged between the civilized and the supposed uncivilized, a divide furthered by culinary practices and agricultural knowledge. The olive tree played a central role in shaping the Mediterranean’s cultural identity: as viticulture and olive growing were suited for the warmer climate and elevation of the Mediterranean, it set the region apart from its northern neighbors who depended on fats like lard and butter. The civilizations of the Mediterranean believed that wine and oil were “a mark of a civilized society, which were able to create its own plants and animals by farming the land and raising livestock.”21 As a result, cultivation became an expression of human mastery over landscape and even culture, shaping and linking them into a specific territory.

Cultivating Faith: The Olive in Early Christianity and Late Antiquity

As Mediterranean religions transformed over time, the olive tree retained its symbolic authority. The Old Testament tells the story of a dove returning to Noah with an olive branch, announcing the end of the flood and the renewal of the covenant.22 Olive oil became the essential medium for anointing kings and priests, most notably King David, marking divine selection and sanctification.23 Centuries later in early Christian ritual, the oil was used for baptism, healing, and burial; each act continually redefining the relationship between the human body and divine presence.

When writing to the Romans, the Apostle Paul turned to the olive to describe belonging and faith, but through a different manner: In verse 17, he writes “…and you, although a wild olive shoot, were grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing root of the olive tree.”24 He continues in verse 24, “You were cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree…”25 For Paul’s audience, the gentile (non-Jewish) believers in Rome, this was a familiar image: grafting, as discussed earlier, joined a different cutting to a living stem, in which the introduced branch would grow with the original plant. The cultivated tree represented God’s covenant with Israel; the grafted branch symbolized the inclusion of gentiles within that promise. “Contrary to nature” referred to the reversal of expectation: the wild joined to the cultivated, the foreign made native. The olive tree thus became a metaphor of adoption and community, transforming a horticultural act into a theology of belonging. Recalling Athena’s gift of the olive tree, we see it operating as a gift again; however, it is no longer about propagation, but rather living participation and spiritual kinship through a symbol of a divine covenant.

The olive tree also continued to function as a material mediator through its most transformative product: oil. Olive oil moved seamlessly between daily life and ritual practice, serving as food, medicine, aromatic, and fuel. Yet its ritual applications gave the olive a different role, one operating at the scale of the interior and the human body. Perfumed oils, associated with Christian relics and anointing, had long histories in the Mediterranean world, appearing as early as the Bronze Age in Minoan Linear B tablets.26 When used for anointing or healing, oil marked bodies as sites of transformation, activating its tactile and sensory properties. But perhaps one of the most intriguing uses of oil is for light, illuminating both ritual spaces and daily life since antiquity till today.

In the ancient world, the steady, low-smoke burn of olive oil made it especially suited for enclosed interiors, though its light depended on constant care and replenishment.27 Within the domestic sphere, the ability to illuminate large spaces for periods of time was a visible sign of wealth as illumination required significant quantities of olive oil.28 In religious contexts, light is almost always associated with divine presence. Churches, temples, and sanctuaries could be illuminated solely by oil lamps, which at times became objects of veneration themselves. It is also important to consider the shared experience and phenomenology of light as something that structured lived experience of interior space. Unlike torches, olive oil lamps were only for the use of interiors. The soft glow of the lamp defined movement and visibility, shaping how bodies occupied and related to one another within built environments. Through illumination, olive oil continues to function as a mediator, linking the sacred and the mundane while also binding communities together through a shared, sensory experience of space.

The Shifting Landscape: Industry and Fragility from Antiquity to Today

By the classical and early medieval periods, olive cultivation had inscribed itself visibly into the terrain. Across the hills and slopes of the Mediterranean, the landscape bears an imprint of ecological domestication. Relying on rows of terraces and ditches, cultivation strategies developed for plants like the olive tree to manage rocky terrain and limited rainfall, are utilized across regions and sometimes entire islands (though their use during classical antiquity is not confirmed).29 Beyond the functional aspect for propagation purposes, these methods also demonstrate a spatial language of power and control; olive groves planted in deliberate geometric arrangements reflect agricultural rationality, but they also express a cultural logic where land was meant to be ordered, bounded, and fruitful.

The supposed permanence suggested by these landscape forms conceals a growing threat. Even tracing back to the Roman period,

[t]here was an ecological price to pay for the economic expansion achieved in some areas of the Roman world. Research is needed to assess the potential environmental debit of intensive olive farming, but it is self-evident that the more marginal soils on to which the olive spread in this period were precisely those most likely to suffer long-term depletion.30

Measures like the annona militaris, a military tax on goods such as oil, wheat, and wine imposed by the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus (ruled 193–211 CE) contributed to a rapid expansion of production during the Roman Empire.31 Entire cities would focus solely on cultivating, producing, and most importantly trading oil as seen in cities like Elaiussa Sebaste (in present-day Turkey), which means “olive grove of Augustus”.32

Centuries later, the demand and consumption of oil have only increased. In 2024–2025, it is estimated that global production reached approximately 3.5 million tons of olive oil.33 In today’s groves, irrigation, industrial monoculture, and high-density intensive practices have placed a strain on both ecosystems and communities. Although the core process has changed little since antiquity, the recent shift toward mechanized methods of harvesting to maximize output are slowly causing the ancestral techniques of the past to lose their place in the modern world of olives. What was once solely a rhythm of seasonal labor shared among families has become a global industry driven by yield and efficiency.

This development has resulted in “simplified landscapes with olive groves with low-nature-value, driving greater negative environmental impacts (EIs), particularly in the form of soil erosion, run-offs to water bodies, increased rates of soil fertility loss, degradation of habitats and landscapes, and over-exploitation of scarce and vulnerable water resources.”34 According to the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of high-density olive groves in Andalusia, Spain, virgin olive oil production emits about 1.59 to 3.26 kilos of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilo.35 This is equivalent to the amount of carbon dioxide produced when burning one liter of gasoline (which is the amount used for approximately eight miles of driving).36

One of the most visible ecological crises that has devastated the groves of the Mediterranean and California is Xylella fastidiosa: a bacterial pathogen that blocks the movement of water through a tree.37 Spread by xylem-feeding insects, Xylella has wreaked havoc across southern Europe, with its most catastrophic outbreak beginning in 2013 in Italy’s Apulia region, a historic center of olive oil production.38

Within years, entire groves of centuries-old olive trees withered and died. In an effort to contain the outbreak, the European Union mandated the removal of infected olive trees as well as the surrounding trees. This was met with widespread protests by local communities who saw these trees as more than just agricultural assets.39 To these communities, the forced uprooting felt like an erasure of identity, a severing of the deeply rooted relationship between land, cultural memory, and livelihood. The impact of Xylella thus extends beyond biology: it exhibits the very notion of a landscape as a manifestation of cultural continuity.

Groves across the Mediterranean may still appear orderly from afar, but many are abandoned, neglected, or managed under unsustainable conditions. Ironically, the very aesthetics that once proclaimed mastery over nature now risks falling into potential ecological crisis. Innovative efforts to revive olive groves, such as the regenerative farming technique of animal-plant husbandry, are occurring, as seen in the video. The value of groves as carbon sinks and the potential opportunities for sustainable agricultural practices are still underexplored. Perhaps a deeper understanding of the ancestral techniques could identify an area of opportunity for sustainable cultivation or, at the very least, highlight the dangers of current methods.

The Olive as a Living Archive

The olive tree is a boundary marker, a sacred gift, a prize of honor, a healer, a bearer of memory. From the mythic wisdom of Athena to the communal labor of harvests, from early Christian grafting metaphors of spiritual kinship to the contested understanding of identity, the olive tree mediates relationships. In tracing it across these various types of landscapes, one comes to see that it is not merely a crop but part of a living network. The olive tree binds the Eastern Mediterranean across centuries through a shared set of practices, relationships, and meanings that are constantly being negotiated. In this sense, it functions as a living archive.

This helps explain a striking paradox. For a plant so central to the economic, ritual, and social life of the Eastern Mediterranean, the olive tree is surprisingly absent in much of the surviving visual culture of pre-modern societies.40 Unlike the grapevine or wheat stalk, the olive tree rarely appears on artifacts such as vases, coins, murals, or sculpture. Perhaps this is due to the gaps in the archaeological discoveries, or perhaps it reflects its role as an everyday constant rather than set apart as ornament. The olive tree’s power lies less in representation than in active, living participation.

At the same time, the olive’s story exceeds any single region. While this narrative has focused primarily on the Eastern Mediterranean, similar patterns of cultivation and meaning extend across North Africa, the Western Mediterranean, and beyond. Finally, we reach the broader question: how has the olive tree challenged and revealed the limitations of defining place by geographic location? What is the Eastern Mediterranean? Are there clear borders marking where it begins and ends? In modern discourse, places such as California are often described as a “New Mediterranean,” where transplanted olive groves brought by Spanish missionaries thrive in familiar climates. Here, the olive tree becomes both migrant and marker, carrying inherited practices while adapting to new ecologies and social contexts. Its global circulation from ancient trade networks to contemporary kitchens reveals that place is not fixed by geography alone. In a world where a bottle of extra virgin olive oil has reached kitchen countertops across the globe, the olive tree offers us a glimpse of a region shaped not by geographic borders or individual identities. Instead, the olive tree reminds us that place is not static, but continually reconstituted through movement, cultivation, and exchange.

  1. Oz Barazani, Arnon Dag, and Zachary Dunseth. “The History of Olive Cultivation in the Southern Levant,” Frontiers in Plant Science, 23 February 2023. ↩︎

  2. Pausanias. Description of Greece, vol. 1, trans. by W.H.S. Jones (London: William Heinemann, 1918). ↩︎

  3. Homer. Odyssey, trans. by Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 13.116-126. ↩︎

  4. Homer, 13.116-8. ↩︎

  5. Porphyry. On the Cave of the Nymphs, trans. by Robert Lamberton (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1983), 38-40. ↩︎

  6. Collections Publications: Goddess and Polis: The Panathenaic Festival in Ancient Athens,” Princeton Art Museum, accessed July 3, 2025. https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/learn/explore/resources/writings/5ddd4a836c925f001639dddd#:~:text=The%20Greek%20poet%20Pindar%20credits,to%20the%20Panathenaic%20prize%20amphora ↩︎

  7. “Panathenaic Festival,” Hellenic Museum, August 12, 2021, accessed July 3, 2025. https://www.hellenic.org.au/post/panathenaic-festival ↩︎

  8. The topic of slaves and their presence in the Panathenaic Procession remain unclear, as scholars have not typically discussed their exact role and visibility. For more detailed information regarding the involvement of slaves in the Panathenaic Procession: “Panathenaic Festival,” Hellenic Museum, August 12, 2021. https://www.hellenic.org.au/post/panathenaic-festival. For more general information about the Panathenaic Procession: “Goddess and Polis: The Panathenaic Festival in Ancient Athens,” Princeton University Art Museum, November 26, 2019. https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/art/stories-perspectives/collection-publications-goddess-and-polis-panathenaic-festival-ancient. ↩︎

  9. Like the religious use of oil, olive oil in the games had both a sacred or intangible component and a functional use. Many athletes anointed their bodies with olive oil before competing and later used a strigil to scrape it off. Even today, in parts of northern Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria (modern day Thrace), oil wrestling is a popular competitive sport and tourist attraction. For the ancient Greeks, understanding the human body was significantly more than just a physical state: being healthy, including what was consumed for nourishment, was also a matter of moral urgency. They understood that the discipline required of athletes signified immense self-control. The “athlete’s ‘greatest contest’ is for the integrity of the soul, and he or she must be always in training, akêsis, for the fight against the onslaughts of desire. This training is both for soul and for body”, Gillian Clark, “The Health of the Spiritual Athlete,” in Health in Antiquity (New York: Routledge, 2005), 216. ↩︎

  10. Fabrizia Lanza. Olive: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 20–21. ↩︎

  11. Donald G. Kyle. Sports and Spectacle in the Ancient World, 2nd edition (West Sussex: Wiley & Sons, 2015), 150–151. ↩︎

  12. Lin Foxhall. Olive Cultivation in Ancient Greece: Seeking the Ancient Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 72–73. ↩︎

  13. Lin Foxhall, 109–112. ↩︎

  14. Theophrastos. Historia Plantarum, vol 1, trans. by Sir Arthur Hort (London: W. Heinemann, 1916). ↩︎

  15. John MacArthur. Commentary from The MacArthur Study Bible, English Standard Version, Romans 11:17 ↩︎

  16. One of the oldest olive trees, the Olive Tree of Vouves, is estimated to be over 4,000 years old. Read here for more information: https://www.forbes.com/sites/scotttravers/2025/03/23/meet-the-4000-year-old-olive-tree-that-saw-the-rise-and-fall-of-alexander-the-greats-empire-a-biologist-explains/. ↩︎

  17. Columella. De Re Rustica. Translated by Harrison Boyd Ash (Cambridge: London Harvard University Press/Heinemann), 5.8. ↩︎

  18. Hippocrates, On Regimen in Health. Translated and edited by William Henry Samuel Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931). ↩︎

  19. Plutarch. Moralia: Dinner of the Seven Wise-Men, vol II, Loeb Classical Library Edition, 419. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/Dinner_of_the_Seven*.html ↩︎

  20. Massimo Montanari. “Food Systems and Models of Civilization,” Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 69–71 ↩︎

  21. Montanari, 71. ↩︎

  22. English Standard Version, Genesis 8:11. ↩︎

  23. English Standard Version, 1 Samuel 16:12–13. ↩︎

  24. English Standard Version, Romans 11:17b. ↩︎

  25. English Standard Version, Romans 11:17b. ↩︎

  26. Yannis Fappas. “Olive oil and perfumed oils in the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean of the late 2nd millennium BC” (Presentation for the Eastern Mediterranean Plant Humanities Workshop, Dumbarton Oaks, June 18, 2025). ↩︎

  27. Fabrizia Lanza, 40. ↩︎

  28. David J. Mattingly, “First fruit? The Olive in the Roman World,” in Human Landscapes in Classical Antiquity: Environment and Culture (London: Routledge, 1996), 224. ↩︎

  29. Lin Foxhall, “Cultivation Techniques on Steep Slopes,” Human Landscapes in Classical Antiquity: Environment and Culture (London: Routledge, 1996), 52–64. ↩︎

  30. David J. Mattingly, 247. ↩︎

  31. The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Annona militaris,” accessed July 15, 2025. https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780195046526.001.0001/acref-9780195046526-e-0299 ↩︎

  32. “Ancient City of Ayaş Elaiussa Sebaste,” Eşsiz Mersin, accessed July 23, 2025. https://www.essizmersin.com/en/2/ancient-cities/ancient-city-of-ayas-elaiussa-sebaste/83 ↩︎

  33. Paolo DeAndreis, “Global Olive Oil Production Hits Record 3.5 Million Tons,” Olive Oil Times, November 26, 2025. https://www.oliveoiltimes.com/business/global-olive-oil-production-hits-record-3-5-million-tons/142651#:~:text=According%20to%20a%20new%20report,producers%20harvested%203.415%20million%20tons ↩︎

  34. L. Fernández-Lobato, R. García-Ruiz , F. Jurado, D. Vera. “Life Cycle Assessment, C Footprint and Carbon Balance of Virgin Olive Oils Production from Traditional and Intensive Olive Groves in Southern Spain,” Journal of Environmental Management, September 1, 2023. ↩︎

  35. L. Fernández-Lobato, R. García-Ruiz , F. Jurado, D. Vera. ↩︎

  36. “1 Tonne of CO2: What Does it Look Like?” Crown Oil Fuels and Lubricants, posted November 12, 2021, accessed July 20, 2025. https://www.crownoil.co.uk/news/1-tonne-of-co2-what-does-it-look-like/ ↩︎

  37. “Xylella fastidiosa,” EFSA (European Food Safety authority), last reviewed May 3, 2024, accessed July 15, 2025. https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/xylella-fastidiosa. ↩︎

  38. Patrick Lee. “Xylella Fastidiosa in Southern California ornamental olives,” (Presentation for the Eastern Mediterranean Plant Humanities Workshop, Dumbarton Oaks, June 18, 2025). ↩︎

  39. Ylenia Granitto, “EU Court Allows Mandate for felling Trees Near Those Infected by Xylella,” Olive Oil Times, June 10, 2016, accessed June 25, 2025. https://www.oliveoiltimes.com/business/europe/eu-court-allows-mandate-felling-trees-near-infected-xylella/51800 ↩︎

  40. Amanda Phillips, “Olives and Olive Trees in Art and Culture,” (Presentation for the Eastern Mediterranean Plant Humanities Workshop, Dumbarton Oaks, June 18, 2025). ↩︎