Olive and let live

Even in poor ground, Toby’s olives are defying expectations, but he’s still making time for a bit of tender olive care…

- Toby Buckland

BACK in the 1980s, I held down a job in Greece working in the service of the Greek Communist Party. This was before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the ‘KKE’ (as it’s known) was on the lookout for agitator agents of revolutionary change.

At the time, I knew nothing about their politics but needed the drachmas, so I happily took up the fight against consumer-oriented liberalism, picking olives from KKE orchards and groves. My time spent climbing up the communist party ladder, quite literally, has been on my mind as, once again, I need to save drachmas, and I have an olive tree so laden it would make a Bolshevik beam with delight.

My tree has been in the ground for 10 years, and was originally planted as a handsome evergreen screen in the rough, stony soil atop a retaining wall. Having worked in olives groves, I knew they do well in poor ground. If – make that when – you go to the Med again, you’ll see they’re planted where nothing else survives on sun-soaked hills, but I never expected that our climate would ever be warm enough for reliable crops.