WILD OLIVES, France – Olea europaea, at the heart of the Mediterranean diet, needs little water. Its silvery green canopy offers cool dappled shade. Its Tucson roots reach back to early Spanish missionaries. Yet Pima County banned it in a hasty decision made decades ago.
The Board of Supervisors, headed by a transplanted Texan with serious allergies, outlawed the olive in the early 1980s. Only neutered trees could join those spectacular old grandfathers on the university campus and around some historic Old Pueblo homes.
When olives briefly flower in early summer, they can discomfit some people within a limited range. But nothing like ubiquitous native trees.
“It’s the mesquite pollen, I’m seeing it already,” Dr. Tara Carr, head of the adult allergy clinic at Banner, told KOLD in February. “We studied this a few years ago and mesquite tree pollen is number one. Palo verde is number two.”
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As for olives, I can bear witness. On allergy panels, O. europaea lights up my arm in red like the Mississippi tally on election nights. I’m asthmatic. Yet I have been intimate with 200 trees since buying an abandoned Provence olive grove in 1983. I prune, pick and plow. Never a hint of reaction.
Not long after, I wrote a book – “Olives: The Life and Lore of a Noble Fruit.” My research took me everywhere olives grow, including southern Tunisia, where ancient trees thrive with no irrigation. Tucson’s rainfall is a downpour compared to endemic nonprecipitation in Sfax.
From Spain around the Mediterranean rim to Morocco, the subject of allergies never came up. Nor did it in California or Latin America. Besides Pima, only Clark County in Nevada bans olives in America. So I did a little digging.
Sam Lena proposed the ban, which passed with little discussion – or solid information. One supervisor at the time told me: “I don’t like them — they take a lot of water.” But David Yetman, who usually knows whereof he speaks, supported it. That gave me pause.
I consulted Jackie Lyle of Civano Growers near Sahuarita, whose titles include Pima County master gardener. As an official adviser, she pushes hard for an olive reprieve. As it happens, she had just exchanged emails with Yetman. He messaged her:
“Based on my current observations, persons moving to Tucson to escape allergens are foolish to do so, if the steady stream of patients at my allergist’s office is any indication and the steady rise of asthma sufferers constitutes evidence.”
That, she says, is proof that the ban hasn’t helped. Up in Las Vegas, her colleague M.L. Robinson at the University of Nevada, echoes her thoughts. A few years ago, he wrote in the Las Vegas Sun:
“Olive trees are beautiful trees. I wish I could promote them here, because there’s a possibility we could produce olives here as a Southern Nevada crop. But people get excited, and they want to ban something. ‘My kid’s sneezing, let’s ban olive trees.’”
Lyle adds a larger context: Pampered humans seek scapegoats. “Perhaps,” she told me, “if we spent more time outside of our air-conditioned homes, away from our HEPA filters, in nature like humans are supposed to, we wouldn’t be pre-dispositioned to these ailments. Maybe our bodies could learn how to live with nature as opposed to just cutting nature out of our lives.”
Checking alternative facts is important when a mayor wants to plant million thirsty young trees in a growing city with depleting polluted aquifers, surrounded by copper mines, orchards and agriculture. In a water-wasting state capital, authorities clamor for a share of what’s left in the Colorado River. Climate scientists warn today’s crisis is just for starters.
But it’s more than that. My book begins:
“Olives have oiled the wheels of civilization since Jericho built walls and ancient Greece was the morning news. From the first Egyptians, they have symbolized everything happy and holy in the Mediterranean. Next time the sun is bright and the tomatoes are ripe, take a hunk of bread, sprinkle it with fresh thyme, and think about where to dunk it. I rest my case.”
Tucsonans wouldn’t have buy this noble fruit. It grows on trees. Just drive up I-10 to the Gila River Indian Reservation to see the possibilities. And listen for any sneezing.
UNESCO declared Tucson the first U.S. “City of Gastronomy” because of edible flora dating back 4,000 years. The Mission Gardens near “A” Mountain preserves this heritage. It lovingly tends ancestral offshoots of seedlings missionaries brought north. Emily Rockey, a natural-born olive whisperer, runs public programs on caring for trees and curing their noble fruit.
My neighbors in Europe follow Arizona’s clown-car politics as closely as I do. What, they ask, happened in a place that once seemed civilized? If the Pima County supervisors reverse that old decision, we’ll be able to say that at least we grow olives.
Mort Rosenblum