Olive wood- beautiful and so old!

Even after more than 30 years in the wood trade, there are moments when you pause in your routine and take a closer look at an everyday situation: with me it was like this a few days ago when I wanted to photograph a few pieces of olive wood.
In the course of many years, thousands of pieces of this always fascinating, beautiful and also so fragrant wood have passed through my hands, and yet I suddenly took a closer look at this beautifully grained piece of Greek wild olive and was immediately impressed by the fineness and the very narrow annual rings of this 60 x 60 mm measuring scantling- I decided to take a closer look at it. In order to do this, I took a macroscopic picture of the end of the brain and looked at the photo with a magnification of about 4 times on the screen. To make a long story short: I counted the annual rings and thus the time this piece of wood took to become what lies in front of me on the table.
It is about 65 years, which can be counted relatively exactly on the magnification. This means that the tree from which this piece comes has grown a little less than a millimetre per year, which is a very low figure for an olive tree growing in the Mediterranean under the best climatic conditions. When you then see the impressive large trees in these countries, you get an impression of the time that these slowly growing Venetian olive trees brought. In many countries like Italy and especially in Spain whole olive groves are leveled, the trees are cut down with excavators and processed into firewood. What a sin!
Our wood comes from an island, on which is managed sustainably and only olive trees may be felled, which because of their high age, no longer bear fruit or have become rotten, or where the wood is cut back anyway through pruning and care measures. That this wood cannot be compared with the turbo-fertilized ultra-fast grown and coarse-year-old Italian olive wood, sees everyone at first sight, which looks once more exactly. These photos speak for themselves!