the ents of pugliapuglia 2015 – 22^nd entry

 
This morning we drove south to Grottaglie. Online there is information about ceramics and murals. What the blogs don’t tell you is that the old town is a mess and the new town not very interesting.

The GPS took us over the mountain and down on the flats we saw the ancient olive trees. We stopped and went into a grove and shop for about a half-hour. The gnarled trunks seem to give personalities to the old, old trees. In the grove we were in, most of the trees were grafted. It seemed that two small trees had been grafted together to produce trunks a good six inches in diameter. Is that why the ancient trees are so gnarly? Are the ancients really a number of trunks intertwined?

One of the photo-essays will be on olive trees. (Tolkien had to be thinking of olive trees when he created the Ents. And Peter Jackson certainly made his Treebeard look like ancient olive trees.)

In the afternoon, we decided to walk the road on the other side of SS-172, going towards Locorotondo. On the horizon a dark thunderstorm covered the hilltop and Locorotondo’s white walls shimmered. We made it to a rise where I was able to shoot the city on the hill and then ran back to the car, determined to not get rained on.

The last image in the slide-show is from a convent garden we passed on our walk. They are red hot-peppers.