Mission Fruiting Olive

The olive is a long-lived evergreen that changes slowly over decades. Young ‘Mission’ trees grow upright and fairly narrow. With age, the trunk thickens, splits, and twists into the gnarled shape seen in old Mediterranean orchards. Bark starts smooth and tan, then roughens to gray. Left to itself, an olive sprouts several stems and sends up suckers from the base. A single trunk usually reflects steady pruning, not the tree’s natural habit. The leaves are thick and stiff: botanists call this sclerophyllous, meaning hard-leaved. The rigid, waxy build helps the foliage handle drought and strong sun. In spring, clusters of fifteen to thirty small flowers form along the past year’s growth. Pollinated blooms become drupes, the single-seeded fleshy fruits we call olives.

‘Mission’ arose in California, but it carries the drought adaptations of a Mediterranean tree. It is built for long, rainless summers and mild, wet winters. Once established, it needs little added water. It grows well in alkaline, rocky, or fast-draining soils, as long as water never pools at the roots. It still needs real winter cold to set a good crop – olives form flower buds only after a stretch of cool weather. Among the older California cultivars, ‘Mission’ is one of the more cold-tolerant. Even so, hard freezes in the mid-teens damage branches, and longer cold below that can kill larger wood. Olive flowers are wind-pollinated and shed heavy pollen. A second olive nearby usually improves fruit set. Birds eat the ripe fruit and can carry the seed into open ground.

Few trees carry as much history as the olive: it was one of the first fruit crops grown around the Mediterranean. The ‘Mission’ selection traces to the Spanish Franciscan missions of 18th-century California. Trees planted along El Camino Real became the base of the state’s early olive oil industry. The cultivar now appears in the Ark of Taste, a catalog of heritage foods worth saving. Raw olives are too bitter to eat because of a compound called oleuropein – they are cured in brine or lye first. Two practical points are worth noting. Olive pollen is a known seasonal allergen, and some desert cities discourage fruiting olives for that reason. The dropped fruit can also stain paving and sprout where it lands, so plant it away from patios and walkways.