The olive tree is of slow growth, but if allowed to grow naturally, it
persists for centuries and attains a great size. De Candolle describes
one tree 23 feet in circumference, its age supposed to be over 700
years. Tournefort found fruitful old olive trees between Ephesus and
Smyrna which must have been planted before the Mussulman invasion, as
Turks had not planted olives, not esteeming them. The Mount of Olives on
the east side of Jerusalem was among the places best cultivated. Near
its foot was the grove called Gethsemane (Gath-Semen, oil press) because
of the olives with which it was covered and those of the slopes above
where an abundance of oil was pressed out. In the Garden of Gethsemane
there remain only eight of these olive trees that are supposed to have
existed at the beginning of the Christian era. Chateaubriand, writing
in the early part of the nineteenth century of these olive trees, said,
“one sees there eight olive trees in extreme decrepitude.” An article
written recently by J. D. Whiting, American Vice-Consul at Jerusalem,
had an interesting statement relative to one of these trees. “El Butini,
the most famous of the Garden of Gethsemane’s eight olive trees, under
which the Savior is supposed to have walked during the night of agony,
has recently collapsed. The great tree was weakened by the locust plague
during the spring and summer of 1915. When El Butini falls, then falls
the Turk, runs the legend.”
Throughout Europe and Asia are many old olive trees, some of them
producing abundantly, their origin, however, lost in remote centuries.
The olive is very tenacious of life, but the methods of cultivation,
which tend to increase production, reduce resistance and diminish its
duration of life.