Olive Tree Landscaping
See how this landscape architect incorporates several mature olive trees on a project in California.
A video transcript featuring Joseph Huettl, Huettl Landscape Architecture
If you want to get a mature tree in a planting palette, one of the choices is the olive tree. With olive trees, you can transplant them with a fairly small root ball. These 17-year-old olives have a root ball that's just 4-foot by 4-foot or 5-foot by 5-foot, and the tree can survive that transplant shock, where other trees might not. So if the homeowner wants an instant, mature look, a field-grown olive tree is one of those choices.
The downside of a field-grown olive tree would be that it is going to have fruit, so you do want to locate it in an area where the fruit drop would not cause a staining problem on a front patio or front walkway. One of the reasons why we had these olives trees was that in this area there are some old olive groves on the hillsides, and so it fits in. And even if it didn't have that, olives in general are very Mediterranean and similar in palette to the native oaks that we have in this area. By having such a mature tree, you have this feel that the house is growing around the tree and that the tree was already there. It's a nice effect.
