A trip to an olive oil factory…
land and trees
Take Olea europaea, add water, sunshine and a lot of hard work harvesting, then make a trip to the olive oil factory, stand back, and let the machinery take over…
water, sunshine and harvest…
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delivery…
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…to the olive oil factory
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machines take the strain
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feeder…
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washer…
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hopper
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extractor
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strainer
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dispenser
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stock in hand
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finished product
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…just add PR!
Acer campestre – field maple
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Carpinus betulus – common hornbeam
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Chaemaecyparis lawsoniana – Lawson’s cypress
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Fagus sylvatica – common beech
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Olea europaea – European olive
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Platanus orientalis – the oriental plane
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Quercus – the Cambridge Oak. Thought to be a hybrid of Q. robur and Q. rugosa
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Sequoiadendron giganteum – the giant sequoia
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Taxus baccata – the common yew
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Zelkova carpinifolia – the caucasian zelkova
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unknown beauty at the arboretum Volcji Potok in Slovenia
Seasons Greetings and Best Wishes for a Happy New Year.
Here is my personal favorite from 2012 – The “Before Christmas Tree”
Today I was lucky enough to enjoy a picnic lunch sitting by a wonderful old olive tree, estimated as 2000 years old, and claimed to be the oldest tree in Europe.
Ancient olive tree at Mirovica, Near Bar
It sits majestically, and these days peacefully, in a village just outside the town of Bar in Southern Montenegro, just a few kilometres from the Albanian border.
But just think of the swirling currents of history a tree growing on this religious and cultural fault line has witnessed over the last 2 millennia! The birth of christianity; the split of the western and eastern roman empires; and then the split of the orthodox church; the rise and fall of the Venetian empire in the Adriatic; the arrival of the muslim Ottomans; and centuries of trouble while Montenegro became a flash point between the Austro-Hungarian Catholics to the North and West, the Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian Orthodox to the East and beyond to the Black Sea, and the Albanian and Ottoman muslims to the South and South East. And, at the beginning of the last century, the arrival and departure of its one and only King.*
And exactly 100 years ago this month (October 1912) the Montenegrins invaded Albania as part of a Slavic alliance with Serbia and Bulgaria, launching the first Balkan War in an effort to liberate the Southern Balkans from Ottoman rule. On this day (26th October) in 1912 the Serbians, recently victorious over the Turks at the Battle of Kumanovo entered Skopje in (Ottoman) Macedonia, effectively signaling the end of Ottoman rule in the Southern Balkans. Around this time the Bulgarians successfully advanced across Thrace and were re-grouping just 20 miles short of Constantinople…
Just two years later, an assassination in nearby Sarajevo would plunge Europe into a wider crisis.
watcher of wars and survivor of earthquakes
Its twentieth century memories are scarcely less traumatic: betrayal by the allies at the end of the first world war and annexation by Serbia; axis occupation during WWII; the arrival of communism with Tito and the liberating partisans**; a devastating earthquake in 1979 (7.1 on the richter scale, with the epicentre no more than a few kilometres away) and bombing by NATO in the aftermath of Serbian aggression in the 1990s…
Today we flew into Podgorica unchallenged from Istanbul on a Boeing 737 and sauntered down towards the Albanian border courtesy of Avis rentals, stopping to picnic by this splendid survivor.
Montenegro achieved its independence from Serbia just 6 years ago. Who knows what the future holds for the oldest tree in Europe? We wish it and its local carers well.
* Norman Davies: Vanished Kingdoms – The History of Half Forgotten Europe. Chapter 12: Tsernagora: Kingdom of the Black Mountain (1910-1918).
** Fitzroy Maclean: Eastern Approaches.
Abu Dhabi enjoys a curiously Janus like reputation in the Middle East.
Looking east from Riyadh, the emirate looks brash and glitzy, an alluringly modern young man, but looking west from fantasy Dubai it seems dour and conservative – a kill-joy parent only good to bail you out when things get out of hand. Relatives can be hard to handle.
Warner Brothers were refused permission to film Sex and The City 2 in the emirate, and had to settle for Morocco, slyly inserting shots of Abu Dhabi later. But this didn’t stop the New York Times from slamming both the film and the (feigned) location:
“Sex and the City 2 flees into a never-never land that manages to be both an escape from contemporary reality and an off-key, out-of-touch mirror of it. The emirate to which the four friends repair is an oasis of gilded luxury in a world that has grown a little ambivalent about unbridled commodity fetishism… The ugly smell of unexamined privilege hangs over this film like the smoke from cheap incense.”
So what – I hear you grumbling – has all this got to do with trees?
Well, to try to make some sense of all this ambiguity I decided to apply my newly invented Hoggs-Bison® googlemetric* which provides a measure of a civilization based on how a community chooses to interact with its trees. So – skipping lightly over the ominous news that many of Abu Dhabi’s palm trees are imported from Florida – here is the evidence for the prosecution, based on a random selection of recent news items portraying the emirate’s sylvan behaviour.
In December 2010 The Huffington Post reported that “An Abu Dhabi luxury hotel that boasted an $11 million Christmas tree decorated with gold and gems admitted Sunday it may have taken the holiday spirit a bit too far. A statement from the Emirates Palace hotel said it regretted ‘attempts to overload’ the Christmas tree tradition by adorning it with premium bling including gold, rubies, diamonds and other precious stones from a hotel jeweler”. The hotel later retracted its statement of regret, and three months later the tree made the Guinness Book of Records (“The most expensive Christmas tree ever created”).
Christmas Bling
In July 2011 Gulfnews.com reported that this 800 year old olive tree – imported from Lebanon – has been planted on a new business and residential development as a “centerpiece to be something unique” chosen for its “character and historic significance”. A new twist on Lebanon’s 6000 year timber exports.
never too old to travel?
In June this year, Gulfnews.com reported that date palms, which apparently need 300 litres of water a day to flourish, are routinely being given 2100 litres, making them susceptible to weak roots, pests and disease. Abu Dhabi has the highest per capita water consumption in the world – 550 litres per day, compared to the global average of 350 litres, and the agricultural sector alone consumes 1.5 billion cubic litres of water a year, which is 52 per cent of the total consumption of the emirate.
By way of contrast, here is Prosopis cineraria, known locally as the Ghaf tree, the UAE’s national tree, which is currently threatened by over-grazing (goats) and over chopping (humans).
stately ghaf, the UAE national tree
and just in case you doubt the destructive power of goats…
goat power
but we are straying from the City…
So how best can we make sense of all this? The Green Prophet blog (a “sustainable voice for green news on the Middle East region” – http://www.greenprophet.com) pointed out in November 2011 that an ongoing campaign to plant one million trees in Abu Dhabi (admirable in itself) seems like one more luxury the Emirate can scarcely afford. Apparently The Emirates Environmental Group (EEG) has planted one million trees in four years in order to stave off climate change and desertification, and to restore its heritage of indigenous trees, but as Green Prophet so neatly summarizes the conundrum:
“Without trees, the planet will heat up even faster and our air quality will worsen. Without water, on the other hand, life simply can’t exist; life grows where water flows.”
* the Hoggs-Bison® googlemetric uses modern browser technology to evaluate the level of porkies oversimplification and good old PRBS in modern spin generated sound-bites.
quixotree 