al1priser

I expected much more from this book but was instead a tad disappointed. From dust jacket: "Alex Dingwall-Main, a distinguished landscape architect working in Provence, is accustomed to odd garden requests from his demanding clients. But when a rich and eccentric Frenchman asks him to find the oldest olive tree in the world to grace his exquisite courtyard in southern France, the author finds himself on an improbable adventure spanning the Mediterranean coast of Europe. In this quixotic, lyrical, and evocative odyssey, we encounter millennia-old olive groves, unscrupulous dealers, mafioso-like skullduggery in the plant world, secret festivals, divided families, hidden villages, farcical disasters, and miracles in holy places. Alex finally locates a three-thousand-year-old olive tree miraculously shaped like an angel, but he is stymied when the farmer tells him he will not sell him the tree unless he buys the two-thousand-acre farm that surrounds it...not to mention the entire nearby village, for the local people believe a drop of rain that has touched the leaves of the Angel Olive will cure anything, from snakebite to the common cold."

2022-09-06 03:25