Today, continuing with the theme of the olive tree, some photos of The Cat’s young families over the years.

The first two photos are of The Cat’s families who were born in the fields. This meant that, in order to get to the garden, they had to somehow get from the field to the drive, then up onto the wall under the olive tree, and then down the olive tree into the garden. Once they had managed that, of course they wanted to explore on their own, and often we would see them climbing through and playing in the branches of the olive tree. Here are Fred and Fickle, leading the expedition to The Top Of The Wall.

The kittens also liked to explore along the top of the dividing wall between the drive and the garden. This is Ginge, peering up through the branches, wondering what those tall animals who lived upstairs were.

For kittens born in the garden, there was no need to learn to climb the olive tree until they were ready. But all the same, the olive tree still managed to play an important part when The Cat and Sprocket gave birth to their litters in the garden. After a fortnight in a dark corner of the garden, the mothers brought their joint family to the terrace where they spent two weeks living in and behind a pile of olive branches which had only been pruned from the tree the day before the cats and kittens arrived.

Needless to say there was no way we could remove the branches until after the families had returned to the garden a fortnight later, but when we did there was not one speck of dirt on the tiles under the branches and leaves; in fact you would hardly know two adults and seven kittens had spent two weeks living there.

The Cat was always fond of lying on the old olive leaves. When there was a good covering of them, they toned in with her coat so well. Here the olive tree is providing shade on a hot summer’s day for The Cat, daughter Whitefur and youngest daughter Flora.

After that, the olive tree continued to provide shade for the families, and climbing exercise and lots of fun for the kittens.