The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Olea
Also called Olives
Olea ( OH-lee-ə) is a genus of flowering plants in the family Oleaceae. It includes 11 species accepted by Plants of the World Online native to warm temperate and tropical regions of the Middle East, southern Europe, Africa, southern Asia, and Australasia. They are evergreen trees and shrubs, with small, opposite, entire leaves. The fruit is a drupe. Leaves of Olea contain trichosclereids.
For humans, the most important and familiar species is by far the olive (Olea europaea), native to the Mediterranean region, Africa, southwest Asia, and the Himalayas, which is the type species of the genus. The native olive (O. paniculata) is a larger tree, attaining a height of 15–18 m in the forests of Queensland, and yielding a hard and tough timber. The yet harder wood of the black ironwood O. capensis, an inhabitant of Natal, is important in South Africa.
Olea capensis subsp. macrocarpa · Black Ironwood · Olive · African olive · Olive tree · Olea lancea · Australian Olive · Elgon Teak · Forest Olive
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Olea by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts are shared under the same licence.
