Grafting for the Future of a Continuous Past
The driveway from the gate into the masseria is about 500 meters long and the road, light colored rocky and a bit bumpy as it is, occurs framed with lushly growing century old olive trees so far as eye can sight on both sides. I drive carefully along it, at once parrying the holes created through erosions in the road and attempting to limit the cloud of dust that the dryness of it causes behind the car as the wheels steer over it. The scenery, one that I by now am well used to, hits me with its splendor. Prominently. Still. Maybe even more so now that I live in an area where the perceived splendor of this place occurs a remembrance of a not too long ago reality also of that place. Staying attentive at once to the experience of driving here and to the road, I allow for the slow pace to provide moments of reflection; upon the densely leafed canopies; upon the reason for the grafting that I will partake in today; upon the dreaded actuality that this landscape within a few years can come to look like the one that I this morning drove from, namely, the vastly desiccated and partly uprooted and replanted one of Salento.
I am on the final part of roughly one and a half hour drive, going from Casamassella to Ostuni, and having driven through extensive areas of greyish and barren olive treetops, many settled within completely overgrown and lush grounds, the sense of this place occurs vividly verdant, also void of beneath vegetation. Consciously driving, I continue my slow pace towards the front of the masseria where I will observe a grafting practice undertaken as a measure to preserve the vibrancy of these old olive trees, thus also, at least in some regards, of the olive oil production they sustain and the character of the landscape within which they are rooted. I glance towards the large brownish dust-clouds sweeping within the orchard to the right and I sight Abdu’ working with clearing the already largely bare ground from any (regrown) vegetation. It is neither the first nor the last time this year that he works the field, but the practice occurs rather a continuous part of his job at the masseria (a job which itself occurs continuous so long as these orchards need maintenance in the name of olive oil production). With this sight in mind, I think about the many humanly abandoned orchards on my drive here, and trickled becomes reflection upon the difference in landscape that I experienced on the road, let alone, as part of my fieldwork. Trickled, too, becomes a great sense of awareness of the much divergent presences and everyday life inherent to them. It is the fifth of May and according to regional legislation—one enacted to mitigate the spreading of the plant bacteria Xylella fastidiosa, or, rather, to limit the presence of the spittlebug acting its vector—it is mandatory to pulizia i terreni before the tenth of May, so to rid them of juvenile spittlebugs and thereby reduce the number of possible vectors transferring the infection corresponding to the desiccation of olive trees; hence, corresponding to the decay of a vital industry as well as that of a patrimonial landscape. A fine of up to 2000 EUR may occur for those not complying with these rules of conduct. 2000 EUR, it is quite a hefty amount for most people, let alone for those who had no choice but to abandon their orchards as they no longer occur productive, not even yielding enough to be worthy of caring for (at least not cultivation wise). Moreover, if one’s trees already occur desiccated, worse yet, if the entire area that one lives in occurs desiccated to the state beyond rescue, what would the meaning be of working the fields to protect against a spreading already happened, and remarkably so. The question is as much rhetorical as founded in the fatigued sense I have got from speaking with layman practitioners and producers in Salento. In writing this, I think about all those people and all those orchards, about how a newfound friend and neighbour over dinner the other night expressed her sorrow of having roughly 1000 olive trees, yet must buy olive oil, and about her concern to nowadays having to pay big money for pulizia i terreni without being able to make use of the produce becoming thereof, such as before. A great deal of thought, too, considers the despair of Corrado when he also this day, the fifth of May 2021, as so many times before, notes how something must be done unless this place is to turn into that of Salento. Time is limited and the situation acute as this area, which is home to 332 000 of the approximately 500 000 millennial trees that the region is renowned for, with its roughly 1950 documented infected trees is considered zona infetta, meaning that the infection no longer can be eradicated (Apulia Post 2021). And so, doing something with the aim to save at least some of the old olive trees growing at the premises of his, he has decided to try to graft them with the Xylella fastidiosa resistant olive cultivar of Leccino. Hence, grafting for the future of a continuous past—his as well as that of many others—he hope to preserve at once some of his livelihood and the ancient roots of its sustenance.
The images featured below comes from the first out of several occasions where this practice is undertaken at Masseria Brancati. It is planned for me to return next week, 20 days after the initial innesto, to observe the removal of the covering paper sheets alongside the evaluation of the attachment of the grafted pieces of Leccino bark onto the trunks of old Ogliarola Salentina. I hope to share in my next post the outcome of that research event. The largest of the images above features the front of masseria with one of its oldest trees—it dates back roughly 2000 years in time—to the left. The three subsequent images, which all are taken in Salento, feature, from the left to the right, vegetation growing in an abandoned orchard (it is until this day still to be cleaned), the foam of juvenile spittlebug on a flower growing in an uprooted field as well as a mountain of uprooted trees stacked in that same used-to-be-orchard nowadays-field.
Grafting i secolari
Using the four tools featured on the picture right above, some nails and pieces of paper, bark from young Leccino plants become grafted onto the ones of old Ogliarola plants. The technique is ancient in principle and practice and vastly used to graft older trees, for instance as a means to utilize the rooted origins and preserving canopies (with younger trees, one commonly make use of innesto a corona, which means that entire canopies are cut down, leaving only the base to be grafted upon, or maybe rather, into). The sequence of images below visualizes the technique—from the initial scraping to the final paper covering—becoming used on 50-something year old olive tree (the relative youth of this tree made it easy to follow the practice from the ground).
