Image of the Week: Snow on Olive Tree
© D. Yael Bernhard
This illustration from my picture book The Life of an Olive takes place in the year 172 CE. The olive tree is one hundred years old. Forty years ago, the tree was badly burned in the Bar Kochba revolt against Roman rule in ancient Israel. The trunk is still blackened, but because the roots survived, the tree has regenerated, as olive trees are able to do. New trunks shoot up among the roots, which actually rob the main trunk of vital energy. To the right stands an older olive tree that did not survive the fire – the "parent" tree, which produced the olive from which the main subject sprouted.
The olive tree needs people to return in order to thrive again. But it will have to wait almost two hundred years for a Byzantine farmer – shown on the next spread of the book – to cut away the dead wood and prune the unwanted shoots. If properly tended, an olive tree can live for several thousand years, which is why I chose to write and illustrate a whole book on this fascinating subject. The tree's two-thousand-year lifespan provides a window into the history of the Galilee and the many people who have interacted with the tree over the centuries, harvesting fruit to be pressed into precious olive oil. Olive trees have both shaped and been shaped by human history.
But for now, my patient subject is abandoned. A lone trader passes through, stopping under the tree to rest. Snow has fallen, making the trader's journey that much more arduous. His donkey carries heavy sacks of colored stones, to be cut into small pieces for making mosaics – a popular art form of the era which archeologists are still unearthing today.
The lack of human habitation during this time period gave me an opportunity to introduce my readers to some of the wildlife of the region. If you look carefully, you'll see a Syrian brown bear – now extinct in the wild – a short-toed eagle, and a gerbil. On the opposite page (shown above) is a mongoose, walking past a thicket of pink-stemmed wild amaranth, which sheep and goat grazed on decades ago, and will again someday.
You can order a signed copy of The Life of an Olive from my webstore.
D Yael Bernhard