The fruit took a year to mature, and consisted of a hard woody capsule containing shiny triangular black seeds.

[3] The Saint Helena olive was already rare by the 19th century due to deforestation and grazing by introduced goats, and was previously thought to be extinct until a single living specimen was discovered in 1977.

It was highly self-incompatible, meaning that most seeds produced with itself or close relatives would fail, making it extremely difficult to grow seedlings, given that the population size for the plant had probably always been low.

The final known specimen in cultivation, a seedling of the cutting, which had been the only surviving plant since 1999, died in 2003 from fungus and termite infestation, making the species totally extinct.

[4] The Saint Helena Olive is one of a number of plant species to have gone extinct on Saint Helena since the arrival of the Portuguese in 1502, including Trochetiopsis melanoxylon, Acalypha rubrinervis, Wahlenbergia roxburghii, and Heliotropium pannifolium, with Lachanodes arborea and Trochetiopsis erythroxylon also extinct in the wild.