Alex Dingwall-Main: The Angel Tree

Reviewed by JIM EAGLES

Wow. What a wonderful story, what a marvellous travel book and if you're a keen gardener what a great source of gardening ideas from all over southern Europe.

It certainly starts with a bang.

Alex Dingwall-Main, an English garden designer living in France, drives into the back of a car driven by a wealthy French aristocrat.

One thing leads to another and soon, as well as getting Alex to pay for the damage, the aristo invites him to propose a design for the courtyard of the ancient mansion he has restored.

Why not, our hero suggests, make the focal point of the garden an ancient olive tree, maybe the oldest olive tree in the world, if it can be found.

From that intriguing beginning the book takes off on a tour of the olive groves of the South of France, Spain, Italy and Greece in search of this mythical tree.

Along the way we discover the central role of the olive in Mediterranean life, meet an amazing cast of venerable families, feuding peasants, delightful bit-players and unscrupulous tree dealers - yes, you can buy ancient olive trees, especially if you don't ask too many questions - as well as learning a lot about the region's gardening styles.

Adding a bit of pimento to this already tasty jar of olives is Alex's idiosyncratic English sense of humour (when his austere Greek authority on olives explains the incredibly complicated formula for working out a tree's age he asks, "Does that mean that olive trees have a square root?") which most foreigners find incomprehensible at best.

Finally there's a climax which would do a novel proud.

I'm not going to spoil the fun by giving it away but suffice to say it's a terrific journey and a delightful destination.

Random House, $26.95