PLANT-LORE OF SHAKESPEARE 
197 
any serious mischief, and fine old trees may occasionally be 
seen which attest its hardiness. There is one at Hanham Hall, 
near Bristol, which must be of great age. It is at least 30ft. 
high, against a south wall, and has a trunk of large girth; but 
I never saw it fruit or flower in England until this year (1877), 
when the Olive in my own garden flowered, but did not bear 
fruit. Miller records trees at Campden House, Kensington, 
which, in 1719, produced a good number of fruit large enough 
for pickling, and other instances have been recorded lately. 
Perhaps if more attention were paid to the grafting, fruit would 
follow. The Olive has the curious property that it seems to 
be a matter of indifference whether, as with other fruit, the 
cultivated sort is grafted on the wild one, or the wild on the 
cultivated one; the latter plan was certainly sometimes the 
custom among the Greeks and Romans, as we know from St. 
Paul (Romans xi. 16—25) and other writers, and it is some¬ 
times the custom now. There are a great number of varieties 
of the cultivated Olive, as of other cultivated fruit. 
One reason why the Olive is not more grown as a garden 
tree is that it is a tree very little admired by most travellers. 
Yet this is entirely a matter of taste, and some of the greatest 
authorities are loud in its praises as a picturesque tree. One 
short extract from Ruskin’s account of the tree will suffice, 
though the whole description is well worth reading. “The 
Olive, 5 ’ he says, “is one of the most characteristic and beautiful 
features of all southern scenery. . . . What the Elm and the 
Oak are to England, the Olive is to Italy. ... It had been 
well for painters to have felt and seen the Olive tree, to have 
loved it for Christ’s sake; ... to have loved it even to the 
hoary dimness of its delicate foliage, subdued and faint of hue, 
as if the ashes of the Gethsemane agony had been cast upon it 
for ever; and to have traced line by line the gnarled writhing 
of its intricate branches, and the pointed fretwork of its light 
and narrow leaves, inlaid on the blue field of the sky, and the 
small, rosy-white stars of its spring blossoming, and the heads 
of sable fruit scattered by autumn along its topmost boughs—• 
the right, in Israel, of the stranger, the fatherless, and the 
