SKETCHING EVERY OLIVE TREE

A one-woman requiem to olive trees

The idea to draw each of our 141 olive trees came when we found signs of xylella fastidiosa in our trees during the olive harvest in 2021. This disease has killed at least 4 million and infected over one third of Puglia’s 60 million olive trees.  Presently there is no cure and the only hope is to graft resistant varieties onto the existing trunks. Aggressive grafting, which we are doing, means removing large limbs and cutting the tree back to a main trunk, completely changing not only the variety of olive but also the shape of the tree. Before the trees are transformed, either by our grafting or the disease itself, I wanted to capture each tree in this particular moment, as the landscape of Puglia, and our land, is dramatically changing.

The daily practice

It’s a moment of stillness and meditation, a conversation if you will, between me and the tree. The tree that likely already has the disease but isn’t showing signs yet.  The robust, centuries-old, thriving, fruit producing tree you can’t imagine will be dead in a few years. I greet the tree by walking all the way around her, choosing from which side I want to draw. What is this tree’s unique characteristic? What do I want to remember, to capture, to explore about this particular tree? The dogs run up immediately, always eager to participate, eventually settling down on either side of me. I clip off a sucker, either from the trunk or from an inner branch, sit down in front of the tree, and begin to whittle the twig into a drawing instrument, one side pointed, one side flat. I pull out my accompanying olive tree diary and make an entry, identifying the tree along with the weather conditions, date and time. Before drawing the tree, I first do a continuous line, blind contour sketch of her in the diary. This is an exercise where one doesn’t look at what they are putting on the paper but instead concentrates only on the object to be drawn, a practice in “seeing” that pulls me deeper into focusing on the tree in front of me. I then dip my newly whittled twig into a jar of black indian ink and begin to draw.  

I began the project in January 2022, and identified and labelled 141 trees on an aerial map of our land. Twenty-one new trees have now been added to the list- small, wild olive trees that grew on their own, and that we grafted in the spring with resistant varieties. As of mid-November 2022 I have about 100 more trees to draw. Below are the first 63.

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