The Groves your oil comes from.
You will have read the short version in our July note. Here is the fuller picture of where the groves actually sit.
Our plots are small and scattered. Most sit on the slopes of Mount Stavrovouni, in the southeast of Cyprus, a little inland from the sea. Others lie further west, in the Solea Valley on the flanks of the Troodos range. They are not one estate. They are pieces of family land, some of them steep enough that no tractor has ever been on them, worked much the way this ground has been worked for a very long time.
Mountain of the Cross
Stavrovouni means Mountain of the Cross, and the name is not decoration. Around 327 AD, Saint Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, stopped in Cyprus on her way home from the Holy Land and founded a monastery on the peak. She left there a fragment of the True Cross, and the monastery still holds it. That relic is where the mountain takes its name. It is one of the oldest monasteries in the world, still active today, looking down over the groves. The Greeks called the mountain Olympus long before any of that.
The rock beneath
For an olive tree, the real story of a place is the rock beneath it, and this is where Stavrovouni is unlike almost anywhere else on the island. Most of southeast Cyprus is limestone and marl, soft sedimentary rock laid down under ancient seas. Stavrovouni is not. It is an outlier of the Troodos ophiolite, a piece of ocean crust roughly ninety million years old that was pushed up bodily out of the sea and stranded here. In place of pale limestone you find pillow lavas, gabbro and diabase, dark, heavy, iron rich igneous rock that you do not meet anywhere on the plain around it.
That difference is not academic. The mineral content of the soil, the way it drains, the heat it holds, all of it feeds back into the tree and, months later, into the lab report. The Stavrovouni groves face southeast, catch the sea wind, and sit on this stranded patch of old ocean floor. Our plots in the Solea Valley sit on the very same ophiolite, up where that rock still forms the Troodos mountains themselves. Two different corners of the island, the same dark, iron rich stone beneath both.
When people ask what makes a place good for this kind of oil, a large part of the honest answer is simply the ground.
Many of the trees are older than they look. A good number were grafted onto wild olive roots that resprouted after fire, so the tree above the soil may be young while the roots beneath it are ancient. Down in the valley, a handful of survivors are Frangkoelia, the olives of the Franks, named for the Lusignan period when French nobles ruled Cyprus between 1192 and 1489. Those trees are somewhere between five hundred and a thousand years old, and they are still fruiting.
The living ground
Look down in one of our groves and you will not see bare, tilled earth. We farm extensively, not intensively. No tilling, and on the steepest plots no machines at all.
The ground is left to grow largely wild, because those roots feed the soil and hold the whole grove together as a living system rather than a monoculture. What looks untidy is doing most of the quiet work.
By July, much of that growth has already done its work and dried down. The herbs and wildflowers of spring have set seed, and the seed now waits in the soil for the first winter rain to wake it.
What stays green through the worst of the heat are only the toughest wild plants, the ones built for drought: wild medicago, wild sage and a handful of others that hold on when everything around them has turned gold and brittle.
In some of the groves there are chickens, free to range all day. They wander between the trees, scratch through the dry cover and nibble at insects, which is pest control and fertiliser in one, asking nothing of us in return.
There is more than olives growing here, as well. Carobs, figs, grapes and mulberry share this ground with the trees, each on its own clock. That is a story for next month, when the first of them begin to ripen.
This is the place. Thank you for reading this far into it.
Click on the pictures below for descriptions
