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<pre>The wild or feral olives in the Adelaide Hills are remarkable, they seem
to favour only a certain type of terrain. To the best of my knowledge
they dont grow west of Mt Lofty but are thick around Mt Barker. My hunch
is that the soil is very different between the two areas with a big jump
in pH & lime being the determinating factor. Many of the greeks use the
seedlings to graft onto, you go up into the hills all day and dig them
out, grow them on in a pot then graft the next season. In parts of
greece (so they tell me) eg Samos & Ios they have the wild olives in the
hills, grandfather gets the young ones to dig out the seedlings. In this
way the culture is passed on. One fellow from Ios spent some time
showing me how to differentiate between certain buds for grafting, to me
it was lost whereas to them it was second nature. Samos experienced big
fires summer of 2000 which burnt out much of the wild stock and groves;
they say that they wont replant due to lack of willing youngsters. In
the adelaide hills I've noticed that some trees seem to have many
seedlings around their skirts and others none. Also they say that some
trees have good oil olives and others give none. Natural selection at
work, if someone could find the 'super cv' & PBR it (I think they are
already looking under the guise of academic R&D) they could be well
positioned for propagation. If you go to the hills around July/August
there are people furtively scurrying around with bags along the
roadsides picking ferals for oil.

Roger Farquhar

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