The olive

How to care for a seemingly immortal tree.

Depressive episodes are like colds. You can feel them coming on while simultaneously declaring to yourself, don’t be ridiculous, your neck is just sore. And just like with a cold, you eventually submit. Accept what’s happening: you are not well.

All of which is to say, please forgive the absence and hello from the other side. I’ve been spending much of the past few weeks convincing myself that there’s a reason to get out of bed by 3pm, and on many days not succeeding. Getting into the headspace to write the bonsai blog wasn’t going to happen.

Which in a way was a positive sign—about the blog, I mean. Writing it has become as integral to my bonsai education as wiring branches. Fire Escape Bonsai’s circulation numbers are…shall we say…indie, but what its readership lacks in numbers it makes up for with quality. I’ve had so many wonderful conversations spurred on by the blog, with readers and fellow tree geeks. Thank you for being a part of this journey.

So I have this olive, pictured above, which I haven’t written about because it’s effectively a twig in a pot and is just growing, slowly, as olives do. But this olive has been in crisis lately, so I figured it’s time to give it the spotlight. First, though, a little backstory.

Olives are insane trees. They can live for thousands of years and the ancient ones look like roiling masses of lava erupting from the earth. Evolution has adapted them for an arid climate of unrelenting sun and scarce rain. Olives are survivors, and through it all they bear one of the world’s most precious fruits, even into Methuselahian old age.

Via Debb Collins / Flickr

You can chop an old olive down to a stump and it’ll grow back even more gnarly. You can dig up that stump without any of its roots, plant it somewhere new, and it’ll build a new root system. Or if you like you can chop that stump into smaller carved shapes and split one olive tree into many. The olive is Captain America. The olive can do this all day.

What I’m building to here is that the olive is the Sysiphusyean hero of Camus, a creature whose unrelenting spirit in the face of certain failure is the lens that aligns an absurd universe into focus. But I have to move the plot about my olive forward now. We can’t spend all day here.

There’s an eBay seller that owns an olive farm in California who digs up old trees and chops them up in the manner described above, for bonsai. It’s a smart business. Each stump can be turned into many bonsai trees, which depending on their size sell for several hundred to a couple thousand dollars. I love their work. Some of the larger trees are practically landscapes unto themselves, with patches of shoots here and there looking like shrubs along a bare-rock cliff face. The seller carves intricate yet naturalistic designs into each stump to bring out more twisted features. You can buy one of these and have it as a centerpiece bonsai on day one.

A while ago I bought one of the seller’s less expensive trees as an experiment. Neither New York’s swampy nor gloomy seasons are conducive to olive growth, but like I said, olives are survivors. The tree was just what you see above, a shard of deadwood cresting like a wave, with a sliver of live plant tissue attached to a patch of bark. What once was a hulking fruit tree is now this twiggy apparition. The tree is living off a single sucker branch.

“Suckers” are little shoots that emerge from the base of a tree right where it meets the ground. Whether growing a tree full size or for bonsai, suckers are best pruned off as they draw energy away from your preferred growth areas. When deciding on a specific tree to buy I appreciated the irony of this one, that a single neglected sucker had become the plant’s entire future.

There, see where we’re going with this? Now let’s back ourselves out, Cloud Atlas style.

The olive had been doing well through spring and summer until a couple months ago, when leaves began drooping and blackening. Underwatered leaves get brown and crispy; overwatered ones turn yellow and floppy. This was neither, and I couldn’t find an answer anywhere. So every day I fretted and searched online in vain and checked the tree only to find more leaves succumbing to the droopy death. I saw no parasites. I didn’t know what search terms to use for “my olive doesn’t care much about being alive right now.” Perhaps my microclimate is indeed unsuitable for olives, and this tree never had a chance.

After reading up on how olives form roots—in a shallow, spreading web to best catch brief snatches of rain—I wondered if the issue was compacted soil drowning some roots and desiccating others. The tree is planted in what looks like sandy field soil, which doesn’t drain well and then, ironically, clumps up so dense that it forms hydrophobic chunks of dirt that repel water.

First I removed all the fertilizer from the tree. Fertilization is for healthy roots and can actually hurt sick ones. Then I sanitized a puer pick and tried to break up the soil in the pot without totally destroying the delicate root system. Once it felt loose and pebbly, I gave it a good long watering to flush out decomposing fertilizer while checking the drainage. Much more consistent.

Not long after the droopy death seemed to run itself out. No more sick leaves and new growth coming in healthy. To be frank I have no idea whether my soil maneuvers had anything to do with the tree’s recovery. It may have shrugged the problem off on its own.

It was about when the olive started looking better that I started feeling worse. One of my depression things is to compound my problems to make excuses for myself: I can’t get any work done because I’m despondent about the future of the planet. Then I feel worse about ignoring my responsibilities, which triggers greater despair about the necrotic state of my industry, yadda yadda. A recent life complication got me wrapped inside that compounding, catastrophizing mindset. It’s cozy, in a way, an old blanket I should have tossed ages ago. The problem is I keep letting my problems compound and before I know it I’ve shot the exponential curve, rocketing towards total indifference.

Depression is many things with many causes, but I think one of them is a well intentioned yet misguided attempt by the mind to protect itself. Once you’re deep in the spiral, feeling nothing becomes a tempting alternative to feeling sublimely shitty. Like Allie Brosh writes, there’s a kind of invincibility to the numbness. The fog is insulation.

A lot of my depression therapy is pattern recognition: watching for the early clues of a spiral and catching myself before I fall all the way down. The reason to do this, my shrink tells me, is that assuming the worst all the time is an irrational and unhealthy way of thinking that doesn’t reflect the way the world really works. “Would you say that’s really the case, or a distortion,” she used to ask in a deadpan that made me squirm.

I’m willing to go along with this because I see where she’s coming from, and for what I’m paying I can’t afford to ignore good advice. But here’s the thing. In my heart of hearts, I can’t always believe it. I don’t think all the conclusions are irrational. These are prismatically shitty times and all roads point to only shittier ones in the future. Am I catastrophizing or just connecting the dots?

For obvious reasons I’ve been revisiting my Camus. “To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy,” he writes in The Myth of Sisyphus. “Everything else…is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question.” Camus thinks the answer is yes, and I’m inclined to agree, because the act of confronting the absurdity of the universe we find ourselves in becomes, in itself, a spark of meaning.

The fog is safe, but there’s no room for sparks of meaning. So I listen to my therapist and Camus and my olive, because I’d also like to be a survivor.

Of course this choice had little bearing on how I was feeling—embracing your existential density isn’t exactly a joyous endeavor—but fortunately the depression has let up. For the moment, I’m through it. The olive, too. Now is what comes after.

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Tree reading

If you’ve read that thing about city planners making allergies worse by planting male trees, take a moment to read this fact check. [Twitter]

No, seriously, look at how you can abuse a dug-up olive stump and turn it into multiple trees. [Bonsai Nut]