Olive wood
The olive tree is the emblematic tree of the Mediterranean region.
A tree with many branches and a gnarled trunk, it can reach 15 to 20 meters in height and live for several centuries. One of the oldest recorded is in Sardinia, its age is estimated at almost 3000 years.
The wood is hard and dense, the brown bark cracked. The leaves are elongated oval, opposite, borne on a short petiole, rolled up at the edges, shiny dark green on the upper side, and light silvery green with a protruding midrib on the lower side.
The olive
It is thanks to its leaf that the olive tree can survive in an arid environment. When it rains, leaf cells elongate to store water. And, in case of drought, the leaves retract and block photosynthesis activity to the detriment of the fruits. The foliage is evergreen, therefore always green. The leaves live on average three years then turn yellow and fall, mainly in summer.
The fruit, the olive, has the skin covered with a waxy material impermeable to water with a fleshy pulp rich in fat. Initially green, it turns black when fully ripe. The olive oil extraction technique is a purely mechanical operation. This means that the final product is pure fruit juice which has not undergone any chemical transformation. We will first grind the olives to make a paste, then press the resulting paste, or centrifuge it to extract the juice, and finally centrifuge this juice to separate the oil from the water. The oil is then decanted in tanks, or filtered to remove the last particles.
What uses?
The wood of the olive tree is hard, dense, it is one of the rare trees whose growth is neither homogeneous nor regular. Which makes it a particularly interesting wood for sculpture, with its tortuous and moving patterns.
Due to this very particular structure, the wood cannot be used in carpentry (too many imperfections), it is mainly used in sculpture or for utility tools in the kitchen (cutting board, bowls, mortars, etc).
Very marked and very irregular veining of the olive tree with warm colors.
Wood grain designs are an inexhaustible source of inspiration. It is an extraordinary wood to work with. (olive tree on oxidized iron).