st. catherine’s lace

ST. CATHERINE’S LACE: Eriogonum giganteum

ORIGIN: California Floristic Province, an iconic plant of the Channel Islands

MATURE HEIGHT AND WIDTH: 8-10 ft. tall and 8-10 ft. wide

GARDENING NOTES: appropriate for a focal-point planting; easy to grow in Pasadena and self-propagates at the garden; despite being vigorous and prone to volunteerism, it isn’t invasive here; plants with umbels like this one and Eriogonum fasciculatum make excellent habitat garden plants, since they attract a wide variety of insect pollinators; full sun, low-water needs.

OLIVE TREES ARE A FAMILIAR SIGHT in the Mediterranean Basin and throughout Southern California where they are common components of residential landscaping and restaurant decor. The trunks of older specimens look like taffy twisted up into curtains of gray-green foliage. Fruiting trees produce olives and also a gooey mess of fruits beneath their canopy. The cultivar we grow in the olive allée — “Wilsonii” — is a “fruitless” olive and is popular in landscapes where gardeners do not want a mess.

The author imagines that the sky was very blue and the wind was very fierce that day, since it was near the beginning of the world and nothing had faded. Poseidon struck the earth with his trident, marking the stone, and birthing a horse and saltwater well. The people of the city marveled because the gift of horses (represented by that single horse) was a great gift. Athena stepped forward and stretched her spear to the ground. No mark was left in the stone. Yet from that spot grew an “olive-tree with pale trunk, thick with fruit” writes Ovid in Metamorphoses, which left “the gods marveling.”

“MORIA” IS THE NAME FOR A SACRED OLIVE

According to old tales of the Mediterranean Basin, the ocean god Poseidon and the parthenogenetic goddess of knowledge Athena once competed to be the patron of a famous city in Greece. In some tellings of this story, each god offered the city a token.

According to legend, the paletrunked tree was the first olive tree or at least the first domesticated one. What Athena offered the city was a source of oil and nutrient rich fruits: the foundation of the Mediterranean diet and a valuable trade commodity. As the inventor of early tree agriculture, Athena was crowned the victor, and the city of Athens became her namesake. The location of the olive tree became the site of an acropolis: a small city of temples set above the human city.

The tree was said to still be alive in the 5th century BCE by the ancient historian and travel-writer Herodotus, who writes:

In that acropolis is a shrine of Erechtheus, called the “Earthborn,” and in the shrine are an olive tree and a pool of salt water. The story among the Athenians is that they were set there by Poseidon and Athena as tokens when they contended for the land. It happened that the olive tree was burnt by the barbarians with the rest of the sacred precinct, but on the day after its burning, when the Athenians ordered by the king to sacrifice went up to the sacred precinct, they saw a shoot of about a cubit’s length sprung from the stump... (Herodotus, Histories, 8.55)

Popular travel websites attest that there is still an olive tree in the Acropolis today, and — in particular — a tree still growing next to the temple of Erechtheus. Some say that this tree is a clone of the original gift from Athena. According to this tale, over the centuries, as the tree was damaged or grew feeble, a branch or cutting was always saved and rerooted. This preserved the genetic line through a sequence of clones, each tree dying, but the gift living on.

CLONES & CULTIVARS

The trees in the olive allee are a so-called “fruitless” variety of Olea europaea , but they are not entirely barren. If you are in the garden in the Fall, you will find a few olives amongst the branches.

Although it does produce occasional fruits, horticultural inventions (cultivars) like “Wilsonii’’ are usually not propagated by seed. Non-hybrid cultivars are usually created when a grower identifies a desirable genetic mutation — in this case, extremely reduced fruit production — and preserves the mutation by cutting off branches or shoots from the original plant. The cuttings are then rooted or grafted onto another plant, which effectively clones the original.

The resulting plants eventually mature into normal-looking trees that contain the same genetic material as the original. Eventually, in turn, they are propagated by the same “low-tech” cloning techniques—similar, in fact, to the legendary tree of Athena and even to parthenogenetic Athena herself, who, like all offspring of parthenogenesis, is partly a clone of her parent Zeus.

FRUITLESS OLIVE: Olea europaea

‘Wilsonii’, ἐλαία (Greek), shajarat zaytun شجرة زيتون (Arabic)

ORIGIN: Mediterranean Basin

Mature height and width: 25-35 ft. tall with canopy up to 30 ft. wide