Kelly Lane | Behind the Cover, Olive Trees in the South

How the ‘Olive Grove Mystery Series’ Came to Fruition With Brief Backstory about Southern Olive Farming

Truth be told, the idea for my cozy mystery ONE FOOT IN THE GROVE, first in Berkley Prime Crime’s Olive Grove Mystery Series, began with my literary agent, John Talbot. I was putting the finishing touches on another cozy mystery proposal when John called to say that he had a great idea for a cozy, did I want to give it a go? There were just two caveats, he said.

First, I needed to have a proposal ready for him to submit to editors within a
couple of weeks. Secondly, I needed to let him know within a few hours whether
or not I’d take-on the project, or he’d contact another author. He explained
that the series geared for the “culinary” cozy sub-genre featured a premise
about “olive oil” with a California setting. Each book would include recipes.

Of course I jumped at the opportunity!

Still, the project was riddled with issues for me. For one, John’s idea for the
California setting – where land and climate lend themselves perfectly for olive
farming – was particularly problematic. An East-Coaster all my life, I’ve only
visited California twice, and knew very little about what it’s like to live and
work on the West Coast. Of course, I’d never been to an olive farm. And getting
out to California to investigate olive farms wasn’t affordable or feasible in
the short time I had to come up with a proposal.

Moreover, I considered myself a relative neophyte when it came to olive oil.
Although I can cook, coming up with my own recipes – which I thought should be
based on olive oil – was especially daunting. And by anyone’s standards I’m a
total kitchen klutz – for example, regularly I burn myself … I even cut off my
fingertip once!

We were pushing it.

On the plus side, I used premium extra virgin olive oils all the time in my
kitchen. I’d written and published articles about the value, versatility and
health benefits of olive oils around the home. And I knew that the olive oil
industry was known for scandal and corruption since early Roman times – a
perfect, built-in backdrop for murder!

So I started googling. Maybe, just maybe, someone was farming olives on the East
Coast.

Eureka! I couldn’t have been more excited when I learned that a small group of
Georgia farmers were just a couple of years into growing a brand-new crop of
olive trees. Using jury-rigged blueberry harvesters, cold-hardy tree cultivars
and newly developed super-dense planting methods, these farmers were busy
producing Georgia’s first commercial offering of olive oil since before the
Civil War. What a great story! Moreover, the story got even better when I
learned that centuries ago, olive trees were plentiful in the southeastern
United States.

According to my research, Portuguese and Spanish explorers brought olive trees
to the New World more than 500 years ago. Two hundred years later, Franciscan
missionaries established olive groves in the areas we know today as Mexico and
California. During the 1590s Spanish settlers planted olive trees at missions in
what is now southeast Georgia. In the 1700s, British colonists led by General
James Edward Oglethorpe discovered these Spanish olive trees in the Georgia
Colony. Olive trees were then planted in Savannah’s Trustees’ Garden.

Later still, Thomas Jefferson arranged for new olive plants to be shipped to
America from Europe. He planted some at his Virginia home at Monticello and
encouraged commercial olive growing in South Carolina and Georgia as well.
Jefferson envisioned olive trees flourishing up and down the Southeastern
seaboard. In fact, plantations on Georgia’s barrier islands – St. Simons Island,
Sapelo Island and Cumberland Island – grew many olive trees for quite some time.
Nearly six hundred olive trees planted by Nathaniel Greene on Cumberland Island
remained productive throughout most of the nineteenth century.

Only it was not to be. Despite best intentions, folks in the Southeast were
ignorant regarding planting methods and disease. In the case of Monticello,
Jefferson’s trees were killed off by less-than-optimal native soils and climate.
And the Civil War brought destruction for many olive farms and plantations.
There were disagreements by garden caretakers that left trees neglected. In the
case of the Savannah trees, squabbles and neglect lead to the eventual – and
tragic – razing of olive trees so the land could be used for housing. Then after
the Civil War, wealthy industrialists purchased old plantations to use as winter
getaways rather than working farms, which resulted in more trees being
overlooked and forgotten.

Still, as I live just minutes from Jefferson’s historic Monticello home in
Virginia, I couldn’t help but think that my olive oil series was meant to be. In
fact I was fascinated by this “new” Southern crop. And it was exciting to learn
how Jefferson’s vision was – finally – taking hold.

So I continued my research and became an olive oil aficionado of sorts. The more
I learned, the more I loved the topic. And a few weeks later, I’d created the
fictional town of Abundance, Georgia, where Eva Knox and her family farmed a new
crop of olive trees on the family’s antebellum plantation. My proposal for the
culinary cozy “Olive Oil Mystery Series” was sent off and accepted by Berkley
Prime Crime, just days after submission.

Only, my series proposal story wasn’t over yet. More than a year after my proposal acceptance, when ONE FOOT IN THE GROVE proofs came back for me to review, I saw for the first time that the publishing team had changed the series from a culinary series about “olive oil” to a setting-based series about an “olive grove” in the South. I was thrilled that the team at Berkley was as excited about the setting as I was. And soon, the “Olive Grove Mystery Series” would be hitting the presses. Now everyone’s dreams have come to fruition! Kelly Lane is an author living on a farm near Charlottesville, Virginia. She has penned as a copywriter, journalist and worked as a business writer, editor and public relations consultant for Fortune 500 companies. Set on an olive plantation in Southern Georgia, ONE FOOT IN THE GROVE is the first book in Kelly Lane’s new Olive Grove Mystery series published by Berkley Prime Crime. Each book includes original recipes inspired by dishes in the story. Visit Kelly Lane at kellylanewrites.com.