Olea europaea "Farga"

The olive is an evergreen Mediterranean tree, sometimes a very large shrub, with narrow leathery leaves gray-green above and silver beneath, and small fragrant white flowers carried in axillary racemes in late summer. Fruit ripened in dry climates is the source of commercial olives and olive oil. In the humid Southeast the olive has never been a dependable fruit producer, whatever the winter hardiness, and the honest advice is to grow one here for the silver evergreen structure and treat any crop as a bonus. There is now a commercial grove in south Georgia, so perhaps a suitable variety has been found, though the University of Georgia's own assessment of adaptability and productiveness in the state remains carefully undecided.

Farga is the heirloom olive of the Baix Maestrat, the coastal country where Castellón meets southern Catalonia, and the variety carries a claim no other olive can make. That corner of Spain holds the largest concentration of millenary olive trees in the world, several thousand of them, with enormous hollow, fluted, gnarled trunks, and the great majority are Farga. Researchers at the Technical University of Madrid dated one, the Farga de l'Arión, at roughly seventeen hundred years, which puts that tree in contention for the oldest olive alive. The oil pressed from the ancient groves now carries a Slow Food Presidium of the Maestrat millenary trees.

Farga yields less than the modern workhorse varieties, and has been returning to favor for the very reasons that once counted against the variety: extreme longevity, real toughness on poor ground, and an unusual genetic makeup including a rare chlorotype that makes the population valuable to anyone studying olive resilience. Two practical notes follow from the biology. Farga is recorded as male sterile, so a second olive of a different variety needs to stand within pollen range for any fruit at all. And when a crop does come, the oil is picked early and tastes of that choice: medium bitterness, a definite peppery finish, and a green aroma of cut grass and unripe almond.

Grow as a multi-stemmed small tree at a terrace corner, along a drive, or against warm masonry where afternoon light can find the silver leaf undersides. Full sun without compromise, and sharp drainage above all else. Olives forgive poor rocky ground and do not forgive standing water, and Phytophthora root rot is the usual killer in this part of the world. Humidity brings peacock spot and anthracnose, both manageable with airflow pruning that opens the center of the canopy and with drip rather than overhead irrigation. Old trees go hollow and characterful, so choose a position worth keeping for decades.

This is a very old Spanish variety that we propagated originally from a tree at what was then Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Georgia. The current batch was struck from cuttings taken on the Armstrong Campus again in August of 2026.