O, my lovely roundabout (No. 1 in a series of 396)

On the way to the DIY store this afternoon I noticed this roundabout where the local council have got round to replacing the palm tree, which died and stayed as a skeletal warning to motorists for some months, with this olive tree. I remembered the title of a talk offered by the ethnobotanist Josiane Ubaud to our Occitan group: O mon joli rondpoint!, hence the title of this entry.
She said - and I agree - that the olive is too sacred, too precious, too old, too linked to our early attempts at civilisation to be used in banal civic locations.
I hope this olive fares better than its predecessor, and bathed as it will be in exhaust fumes, perhaps it will escape the olive fly which is the bane of oil producers. But it won't fulfil its destiny of fruiting and giving oil - who would bother, who would want them?
We have lost our sense of the meaning of trees. The olive tree has become a badge, an accessory for councils to show their Midi credentials. Something instant, bought at some expense from a garden centre, ideal for a consumer society whose members drive to DIY stores.