At a recent dinner party, we guests were a little bemused when the salad was served entirely undressed. Then the host brought out a bottle of olive oil and placed it reverently in the middle of the table. “This,” he announced, “comes from our own trees.” None of us dared take more than a few drops of the precious liquid; but even so, the salad was delicious.

Adoption schemes have been popular with town-dwellers who want a piece of the Good Life without sacrificing any of the amenities of city living. It started with adopt-a-vine schemes. Lately, consumers have been invited to take a share in a pig. And now we have the olive tree adoption scheme, an idea pioneered by two British former television producers, Cathy Rogers, 37, and Jason Gibb, 33, now living in Le Marche in rural Italy.

The couple were living in Los Angeles and working for a TV production company when they began nurturing a dream of a more rural way of life. Three years ago they took the plunge and invested in 21 acres of neglected olive grove, but have been in business as olive oil producers only since October. Even so, 350 of their 881 olive trees have already been adopted, mostly by Britons seeking innovative Christmas presents.

The principle is simple: for £75 you can pick your “own” tree for a year and get an adoption certificate. After the olives are harvested, you are sent between 1 and 3 litres of olive oil, a bottle of lemon-infused oil and hand-made olive oil soaps, plus photos of the tree on request. You can also visit your tree whenever you like.

“Everyone says it’s a fantastic excuse for a weekend in Italy,” Rogers says, “but nobody has come yet although one of our clients is planning a surprise trip for his wife to meet her tree.”

Visiting adopters will be given a picnic that they can take to eat under the shade of their olive tree. It is a marketing approach that has left Rogers’s Italian neighbours bemused. “They think we’re mad,” she says.

Well, £75 does seem steep even for a full year’s produce — especially when you consider that no single tree produces enough olives to be pressed on its own. What adopters receive is a share of the crop produced by their own tree and 50 others.

But such schemes are not simply about value for money. There’s the romance of owning a tiny piece of Italy — and helping to preserve an ancient way of life. “And it’s part of the whole organic, anti-GM movement that’s so big in Britain at the moment,” Rogers says.

“The reason Italians don’t really understand what we’re doing is because it’s completely normal here to go into the butcher’s and ask where the meat is from. They are much more in touch with their food than we are in the UK.”

In our more urban society, however, it seems the ultimate status symbol is to have a kitchen full of home-produced comestibles — without getting your hands dirty.

Home grown

You can try growing your own olives at home. The tree must be planted in a sunny, sheltered spot, and in winter should be protected from frost. Tiny, fragrant, white flowers will appear from June to August, and should be followed, in hot summers, by your own mini-harvest.

www.nudo-italia.com

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