Born in the Iberian Peninsula some 800 years ago – when Muslim caliphs still ruled large parts of Spain – the hoary olive trees on the left have traveled thousands of kilometres to Hyderabad,the city of Nizams, where they wait to be bought by some nabob.

The olives, and many other exotic trees that share space at a 250-acre facility on the outskirts of Hyderabad, have been imported by Unique Trees – the biggest name in the business and the first to get an import licence from the agriculture ministry in 2011.The client list of Unique, which sells these imported trees for prices ranging from Rs 10,000 to Rs 12 lakh each, looks like a roll-call of the rich and famous, and includes Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan, tourism minister and veteran actor Chiranjeevi, and Telugu superstar Junior NTR. Most celebrities buy these trees, whose ages vary from 10 years to 800 years, to beautify their homes and are not averse to spending some big bucks. Back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that many of them allocate as much as 10% of their home-building budget for landscaping. Read more of this post