Olive Herb: What It Is, and Why It Isn't an Olive
Olive herb is one of the more misleading names in the herb trade. Search for it and you find a small, bright green shrub sold by British nurseries for the olive-like scent and flavour of its leaves — but the plant has nothing to do with the olive tree. It is Santolina rosmarinifolia, a member of the daisy family from Portugal and Spain, and a close relative of the grey cotton lavender edging a thousand front gardens. It is not olive leaf either, which is a different plant and a different search. This guide covers what the botanical register of record says the plant is, whether it genuinely tastes of olives, how to grow it through a British winter, and how to use it with olive oil without ignoring the food-safety rules the nursery pages leave out.
We grow olives rather than olive herb. For our own oil, see our cold-pressed organic Marrakech olive oil.
The Short Answer
- Olive herb is Santolina rosmarinifolia L., a compact evergreen subshrub in the daisy family, Asteraceae, native to western Portugal and western and central Spain according to Kew's Plants of the World Online. It is not Olea europaea, the olive tree, and it is not olive leaf.
- The Royal Horticultural Society lists it as green lavender cotton, with holy flax as a second common name. "Olive herb" is a trade name, and some nurseries sell it under the selection name 'Olivia'.
- The leaves carry a green, resinous, faintly bitter note that most people place as olive. The chemistry does not explain the name: a 2023 analysis of a wild Portuguese population found the leaf oil dominated by β-pinene, borneol, myrcene and limonene — pine, camphor and citrus molecules.
- It is genuinely hardy in Britain. The RHS rates it H5, hardy across most of the UK even in severe winters. What kills it is winter wet, not cold.
- Use it as a seasoning, not a vegetable — snipped into salads, pasta, pizza and fish, or as a sprig where an olive garnish would go in a drink.
- The infusion method some suppliers recommend — fresh sprigs steeped in olive oil at room temperature for a fortnight — is the practice the Food Standards Agency warns against. Make it fresh at the table, or refrigerate and use within four days.
- Sidr & Stone sells no herbs. Our olive oil is single-estate Moroccan, rain-fed, organically grown and cold-pressed within hours of harvest.
What Olive Herb Actually Is
Olive herb is the trade name for Santolina rosmarinifolia, a compact evergreen shrub in the daisy family, grown for narrow green leaves that smell and taste of green olives. It is native to Portugal and Spain, unrelated to the olive tree, and sold in Britain as a culinary herb for salads, pasta, fish and drinks.
The name has three near neighbours, and it is worth setting them side by side — Google's own "people also ask" box under this search fills with olive-leaf questions, which shows how often they are conflated.
| Name | What it actually is | Family | What people do with it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Olive herb | Santolina rosmarinifolia L. — a small Iberian shrub whose leaves smell of olives | Asteraceae (daisies) | Leaves snipped as a seasoning; a sprig in a drink |
| Olive tree | Olea europaea L. — the tree that gives table olives and olive oil | Oleaceae | The fruit is cured or pressed for oil |
| Olive leaf tea | Dried leaves of Olea europaea, steeped in hot water | Oleaceae | Drunk as a caffeine-free infusion |
| Cotton lavender | Santolina chamaecyparissus L. — the grey, woolly ornamental | Asteraceae (daisies) | Edging and low hedges; not the culinary plant |
Two of those rows are covered elsewhere on this site: for the tree itself, see our guide to what the olive tree actually is; for the leaf infusion and what the trials on it measured, see olive tea. This article is about the shrub.
The Botany, Checked Against the Register
The botanical names here were checked against Kew's Plants of the World Online while this was written, because the nursery listings for this plant do not all agree with each other, and one does not agree with the register.
Kew gives the accepted name as Santolina rosmarinifolia L., first published by Linnaeus in Species Plantarum in 1753, in the family Asteraceae, and records it as a subshrub native to western Portugal and western and central Spain. The epithet means rosemary-leaved, which is what the foliage looks like from a distance. Kew accepts two subspecies: subsp. rosmarinifolia, the one in cultivation, and subsp. arrabidensis Riv.-Guerra.
Here the trade and the register part company. One well-regarded British herb nursery lists Santolina viridis and Santolina virens as synonyms of olive herb. Kew does not: it treats Santolina virens Mill., published in 1768, as a separate accepted species from northern Spain, with S. viridis Willd. as a synonym of that. Whether every plant in a British pot is pure rosmarinifolia is not something a label will tell you. Where a nursery and the register disagree, the register wins — the same discipline we applied to the olive tree.
| Point of fact | What the register or the RHS says |
|---|---|
| Accepted name | Santolina rosmarinifolia L., Sp. Pl. 842 (1753) — Kew POWO |
| Family | Asteraceae — the daisy family, not the olive family |
| Native range | Western Portugal; western and central Spain — Kew POWO |
| Subspecies accepted | subsp. rosmarinifolia; subsp. arrabidensis — Kew POWO |
| S. virens / S. viridis | A separate accepted species and its synonym, not synonyms of olive herb — Kew POWO |
| RHS common names | Green lavender cotton; holy flax |
| "Olive herb", 'Olivia' | A trade name and a nursery selection name; neither is a botanical rank |
| Native to Britain or Ireland | No — RHS |
The grey plant most people know as cotton lavender is Santolina chamaecyparissus L., which Kew lists as lavender cotton. Same genus, everywhere, and not the culinary one. If you are going to eat a santolina, eat the bright green plant you bought as a herb — not the silver one already in the border.
Does It Really Taste of Olives?
Crush a leaf and the first impression is sharp and green, and most people reach for the word olive — green olive, or the brine an olive sits in. In the mouth it is resinous, faintly bitter, with a camphor edge behind it. It is a savoury note rather than a sweet one, and it does not fade quickly.
The chemistry does not explain the name, and it is worth being straight about that. Alves-Silva and colleagues, writing in Antibiotics in 2023, distilled the essential oil of Santolina rosmarinifolia collected near Setúbal in Portugal and found it dominated by β-pinene at 29.6%, borneol at 16.9%, myrcene at 15.4% and limonene at 5.7% — molecules better known from pine resin, camphor and citrus peel. Nothing in that list is an olive molecule. The "olive" is a perception: real enough that three British nurseries sell the plant on it, but the palate matching a green, bitter, resinous signal to the nearest familiar food rather than a shared chemistry. Composition also varies with population and season, so a pot in Gloucestershire will not read exactly like a wild plant on the Portuguese coast. We cite that paper for its composition only; it went on to test the oil for things this article makes no claims about.
The practical point follows. Olive herb does not replace olives. It gives a dish an olive-adjacent savoury note without the salt, the oil or the fruit — a different and sometimes more useful thing.
| Where it works | How to use it | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Green and tomato salads | Snip the leaves very fine and dress with olive oil | The bitterness balances sweet tomatoes and rich oil |
| Pasta and pizza | Scatter at the end, off the heat | Heat drives the volatile note off quickly |
| Fish | A sprig or two under the fillet as it cooks | The resinous note suits oily fish the way rosemary suits lamb |
| Drinks | A sprig where the olive garnish would go | The whole cocktail-garden trade for this plant rests on this one use |
| Bread and oil | Bruise a sprig into a bowl of oil at the table | Fresh, and eaten the same meal — see the safety section below |
How to Grow Olive Herb in a British Garden
This is where olive herb beats the tree it is named after. You can grow an olive tree in Britain, but as our olive-tree guide sets out, Kew's own olives have flowered and set small fruit without ever ripening a crop. Olive herb gives you the flavour note from a nine-centimetre pot in its first summer, and it is hardier than most people assume.
| What the RHS records | Detail |
|---|---|
| Hardiness | H5 — hardy in most places throughout the UK even in severe winters |
| Position | Full sun |
| Soil | Chalk, loam or sand — sharp drainage in every case |
| Size | 0.5–1 m in height and spread; a compact, spreading shrub to about 60 cm |
| Foliage | Evergreen; finely cut, bright green, aromatic |
| Flowers | Bright yellow button-like heads in summer |
| Drought resistance | Yes |
| Propagation | Semi-ripe cuttings in late summer |
| Pests | Generally pest-free |
The one thing that kills it is winter wet. An H5 rating means cold is not the problem; a plant sitting in waterlogged soil from November to March is. Give it the sharpest drainage you have — a gravel bed, a raised border, or a terracotta pot with grit through the compost and the pot lifted on feet — and the sunniest spot you own. The RHS lists chalk among its soils, so a limy garden is no obstacle.
Harvest by snipping, which doubles as the light pruning that keeps it compact; the usual advice for santolinas is a trim after flowering and never a hard cut into old bare wood. Nursery pages describe it as short-lived in the wrong conditions, which matches the RHS emphasis on drainage — so take a few semi-ripe cuttings in late summer as insurance. They root much as rosemary does.
Olive Herb and Olive Oil: Using Them Together, Safely
There is a reason a herb article on this site ends up talking about olive oil. Olive herb is a seasoning, and seasonings ride on fat: the leaves are snipped into dressed salads, scattered over oiled pasta, or bruised into a bowl of oil for bread. The oil is the vehicle and usually the loudest flavour — a tired oil cannot be rescued by a good herb, and a good oil carries an ordinary pinch a long way. Our guide to choosing a quality olive oil covers what separates one bottle from another.
Infusing is where the supplier advice needs correcting. One supplier ranking on the first page for this search sells the cut herb "for infusing", and its method is to bruise the fresh leaves, submerge them in olive oil in a sealed jar, and keep the jar in a cool, dark place for one to two weeks. That is a fresh, moist, low-acid plant, sealed away from oxygen, at room temperature, for a fortnight — the combination the food-safety guidance exists to prevent. The Food Standards Agency states that bottling products such as herbs or garlic in oil at home can be risky, because the control needed to destroy or prevent the growth of Clostridium botulinum spores is difficult to achieve outside a controlled process. University of Georgia Extension's Circular 1334 is more specific: heat the oil to 180 °F, about 82 °C, before adding fresh or dried herbs, and because that method does not acidify the herb, keep the oil refrigerated and discard it four days after making it — or freeze it.
None of that means you cannot put olive herb in oil. It means you do it one of three ways.
- At the table, the same meal. Bruise a sprig or two into a shallow bowl of good oil, eat it with bread, and store nothing. This is the method in our guide to building a dipping oil worth the bread, and it sidesteps the storage question entirely.
- A short fridge infusion. Warm the oil, add the bruised sprigs, cool, refrigerate, and use it within four days. Expect it to cloud in the cold; it clears as it warms.
- Dry the herb first. Dried herb has far less water to work with, and the case for dried over fresh is made in full in our piece on rosemary olive oil. Even then, follow the storage rules set out in our guide to infused olive oil, which walks through the FSA and university extension guidance in detail.
For the herbs a Mediterranean kitchen actually reaches for, and why most of them are carried in oil rather than eaten on their own terms, see Tuscan herbs.
The Objections Worth Taking Seriously
"You sell olive oil. Is this a gardening article dressed up as a funnel?" We sell no herbs, plants or seeds, and nothing in this article is ours to sell. The connection is the real one — the herb is a seasoning that rides on oil, and infusing is how most people who buy it end up using it — and the safety section is worth the article on its own. If you leave with "don't leave fresh herbs in a sealed jar of oil on the worktop", that is a good outcome for us.
"Santolina is an ornamental. Is it actually safe to eat?" The green species is grown and sold as a culinary herb by specialist British nurseries and used as a seasoning in small amounts — a few snipped leaves, a sprig in a glass — not as a vegetable. It lacks the centuries of documented kitchen use that rosemary or sage have, so ask a GP or pharmacist before making any new herb a daily habit if you are pregnant or take prescribed medication. Two firmer cautions: the grey cotton lavender in the border is a different species and not the culinary plant, and never eat a garden plant you have not positively identified.
"Does it really taste of olives, or is that marketing?" Both. The note is real enough that people buy the plant on it and come back for more; the chemistry says it is pine, camphor and citrus molecules producing a green, bitter, resinous impression the palate files under olive. It will not replace olives in a dish. It will add something olives cannot.
Why Sidr & Stone
This article is mostly about a plant we do not grow, which is the right proportion for it. The reason we can write about herbs and oil with any confidence is that our oil comes from one grove, and we know what was decided in it.
- Single-estate — one family-owned grove on the plains outside Marrakech, Morocco, with no blending across origins.
- Rain-fed — the trees are not irrigated; they take what the season gives them.
- Organically grown — no synthetic fertilisers, pesticides or herbicides. Organically grown, not certified organic; we say which.
- Single harvest — a small batch pressed once a season, gathered only when the fruit is ready, which has meant picking weeks after neighbouring farms.
- Cold-pressed within hours of harvest — which is what preserves flavour, aroma and polyphenols.
- Unfiltered extra virgin — minimally processed, and it may show natural sediment, which is normal for an unfiltered oil.
- 100% natural — one ingredient, olive oil, with nothing added.
- Dark glass with a gold label — packaging that protects the oil from light.
- Halal certified.
- 10% of profits to charity — a commitment that applies across every Sidr & Stone product.
- Fulfilment in the UK, EU, and US.
We publish no polyphenol figure for this oil, because we have not yet had it tested; when we do, the number goes up whatever it says. We will not tell you Sidr & Stone is the best olive oil — that is exactly the sort of unbacked claim this article has spent its length picking apart. What we will say is that the oil is single-estate Moroccan, rain-fed, organically grown and cold-pressed within hours of harvest, and that the evidence of that care is in the taste, the colour and the size of the season's small batch.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is olive herb?
Olive herb is the trade name for Santolina rosmarinifolia L., a compact evergreen shrub in the daisy family, native to Portugal and Spain, whose narrow green leaves smell and taste of green olives. The RHS lists it as green lavender cotton or holy flax.
Is olive herb related to the olive tree?
No. The olive tree is Olea europaea, in the family Oleaceae. Olive herb is a santolina, in the daisy family Asteraceae. They share a name because the leaves of one smell like the fruit of the other, and nothing else.
Is olive herb the same as olive leaf?
No. Olive leaf — sold as olive leaf tea or extract — is the dried leaf of the olive tree, Olea europaea. Olive herb is the foliage of a completely different plant, Santolina rosmarinifolia. They are conflated constantly in search results and have nothing in common beyond the word.
What does olive herb taste like?
Green, resinous and faintly bitter, with a camphor edge, in a way most people place as green olive or olive brine. Its leaf oil is dominated by β-pinene, borneol, myrcene and limonene rather than anything found in olives, so the resemblance is a perception rather than a shared chemistry — but it is a consistent one.
Is olive herb hardy in the UK?
Yes. The RHS rates Santolina rosmarinifolia H5, hardy in most places throughout the UK even in severe winters. It needs full sun and sharp drainage; what kills it is winter wet rather than cold, so grow it in gravel, a raised bed or a gritty pot lifted off the ground.
Can you eat olive herb?
It is grown and sold as a culinary herb by specialist British nurseries and used as a seasoning in small quantities. Use it as a herb, not a vegetable; make sure the plant is the green culinary species and not the grey ornamental cotton lavender; and ask a GP or pharmacist before making any new herb a daily habit if you are pregnant or take medication.
Where can I buy olive herb?
Specialist herb nurseries in Britain sell it as a potted plant, usually in a nine-centimetre pot, and at least one supplier sells it as a cut herb for chefs. It sells out quickly in spring. We do not sell herbs, plants or seeds.
Is olive oil a medicine?
No. Olive oil is a food, not a medicine. It has a long traditional history — including being honoured in the Prophetic Sunnah — and a substantial body of modern research, particularly around polyphenols, cardiovascular health, and the Mediterranean diet pattern. It can be a worthwhile part of a healthy routine, but it does not cure diseases and is not a substitute for medical care. Be cautious of any olive oil marketed with specific disease-cure claims.
Final Thoughts
Olive herb is a good plant carrying a slightly dishonest name. It is not an olive, it is not olive leaf, and its chemistry has more in common with a pine tree than with anything on the olive branch. It is also hardy, handsome and genuinely useful in a kitchen that already leans on olive oil — which is why it deserved a straight answer rather than another paragraph of nursery copy.
The habit worth taking from this runs through most of what we write: when a name sounds like a promise, look for the thing that can be checked. Here that meant the register for the botany, the RHS for the hardiness, a published analysis for the flavour, and the Food Standards Agency for the jar of oil on the worktop. Three of the four contradicted something a sales page said.
Grow the herb, then, and use it with a good oil — fresh, at the table, the same day. Our cold-pressed organic Marrakech olive oil — single-estate, rain-fed, organically grown and pressed within hours of harvest — is open for pre-order on its limited first harvest. Estimated shipping from November 2026. Fulfilment in the UK, EU, and US.
Pre-Order Sidr & Stone Organic Marrakech Olive Oil — Limited First Harvest →
Disclaimer: This article describes botanical classification, horticultural guidance and public food-safety guidance at the time of writing; taxonomic opinion, nursery practice and official guidance change, and readers should check current sources — Kew's Plants of the World Online, the Royal Horticultural Society and the Food Standards Agency are the sources used here. It describes how a culinary herb is used and does not recommend it for any health purpose. Olive oil is a food, not a medicine, and is not a substitute for medical treatment of any condition. For any health concern, consult a qualified medical professional.