Trees of peace

Gone, he said were the fig trees that once carpeted the valley, lush and green. When the people left, the figs began to disappear. Olive trees took their place—less demanding and more gentle—but they, too, were ignored. Olives were trees of peace, and there was no peace here.

Anthony Shadid, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), p. 130