Sixteen years ago, a neighbour in Venice told me about some olive groves for sale in Salento, southern Puglia. I visited the region that July, and the groves were magical. They had a patchwork nature: huge groves owned by olive-oil producers were mixed with many small groves, which had been divided into smaller and smaller plots as they passed down the generations. Meticulously neat groves bordered those where wildflowers burst out around the trees. I bought a grove on a slope dotted with 116 old trees. A few months later, I met Amber and we had a house built, inspired by the pajare (shelters) erected centuries ago for those who tended the olive trees. The house was finished the day before our wedding, and we return to it every spring and summer and sometimes in winter. In 2014, we heard about a disease called Xylella fastidiosa, which stops water reaching a tree’s branches and causes them to die. The bacterium has ravaged vineyards and citrus groves in the Americas, where it’s endemic. Once in Puglia, it jumped to olive trees among others. When we asked how we might protect our grove, we encountered a wave of contradictory advice and conspiracy theories. Some men in the local bar were convinced the disease had been engineered by agribusiness to make money, while environmentalists blamed the use of chemicals. A traditional ‘pajare’ (shelter) sits among infected trees, Maglie, Puglia
It took a year for the authorities to decree that the ground under the trees had to be kept clear, either by ploughing or cutting back the weeds that proliferate each spring, as Xylella is spread by plant-sucking insects. By then, more than a million trees in Salento had been affected with what is now known as olive quick decline syndrome, or OQDS.
A few of our trees began to show the tell-tale signs, with dried-out twigs on the outer branches. We cut them back, and the first trees to be infected sent out a few fresh shoots from the trunk. But these soon seemed the last gasps of a strong tree being slowly strangled, its centuries-old root systems desperate to survive. This year, Puglia was the perfect place to be in quarantine — instead of being cooped up in a flat in Venice, our sons had an olive grove to play in — but our trees were dying before our eyes. We watched the grove turn from a soft green to a ghostly grey. The local paper reports that 20 million trees have been infected, while the patchwork that once enchanted me is transforming into a grim new pattern. There are groves of stumps made by owners who believe you can cut out the disease; trees left to grow bushy by owners who have given up now they no longer produce olives; plots filled with tiny saplings; groves where people haven’t had the heart to pull out the old trees and have planted new ones among them (as we have done).
There is still a beauty to the ghostly trees, yet last month I came across a bulldozer pushing over some several centuries old. A few weeks later, a wood grinder arrived. It picked up the trunks with their tangle of dead branches. Within 10 seconds, a mature dead tree was chipped and sprayed, ready to be reduced to pellets.