An American created a tree that bears fruit with 40 different fruits: where you can see it

American artist and professor Sam Van Aiken creates trees that grow 40 different kinds of fruits at the same time. For most of the year, the tree looks completely normal, and in spring the entire crown is filled with colorful buds, reports Epicurious.

Photo: IStock

Van Eiken designed this tree as a work of art. First, the branches begin to bloom in different shades of white, pink and crimson, and later, in the summer, the tree bears 40 different fruits.

Using a unique process he calls “sculpture through grafting,” Van Eijken creates trees that grow and support over 40 stone fruit varieties, including many rare, vintage and local varieties. Stone fruits, says Van Eycken, have the most diversity among species and are the most compatible with each other.

Although it requires precision, the grafting required to create these multi-fruited trees is not all that difficult, reports Smithsonian. Van Eijken takes a cut of a fruit tree with buds and inserts it into a matching incision in the host tree, which has been growing for at least three years. Then he wraps this place with electrical tape to hold the parts together. When all goes well, the "veins," he says, of different trees flow into each other, forming a common vascular system.

In other cases, Van Eycken uses a type of inoculation using only the kidneys. He removes healthy buds from the tree in February and stores them in the freezer until August. He then cuts the buds from the branches of the host tree and replaces them with those that were stored in the refrigerator. He wraps the new buds in foil, creating a greenhouse effect, and the next spring cuts off any remaining old buds near the grafted site. The idea, Van Eycken says, is to fool the host tree into believing that the new parts are part of itself.

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For three years after planting one of his trees, the artist visits him twice a year: once in the spring to prune the branches, and the second time in the summer to plant new cuttings.

It takes about five years to grow each tree and graft 40 varieties onto it.

“First of all, I view wood as a work of art. I want the tree to transform everyday life. When a tree suddenly blooms with different colors or you see these different types of fruits hanging from its branches, it not only changes the way you look at it, but it also changes your overall perception,” says the artist.

History in brief

Award-winning contemporary artist and Syracuse University art professor Sam Van Aiken grew up on his family farm in Reading, Pennsylvania, but spent his college years and much of his early career in the arts rather than farming. Van Eycken says his work has always been "inspired by nature and our relationship with nature." In 2008, he paired vegetables together to create strange plants for his exhibit, and shortly thereafter, he began working on hybrid fruit trees that would become the 40 Fruit Tree.

Each tree starts out as a slightly odd specimen, reminiscent of some kind of science experiment, and looks like any other tree for most of the year. In spring, the trees bloom, providing an incredibly vivid and thought-provoking example of what can happen when nature inspires art. Then, within a few months, the Van Eyken trees produce an incredible harvest of plums, peaches, apricots, nectarines and almonds.

“Although it becomes difficult to graft cherries, in most cases plums, peaches, apricots, nectarines and even almonds can be easily grafted,” says Van Eyken.

His primary source for most of these varieties was the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, New York. When he started the project, the Experiment Station had an orchard with hundreds of different varieties of plums and apricots. They planned to liquidate this orchard, so Van Eijken took out a lease until I could graft all these varieties onto the trees in my nursery.

Project development

“I currently work with over 250 varieties of stone fruits and have developed a timeline for when they bloom in relation to each other. By grafting these different varieties onto a tree in a specific order, I can create how the tree will bloom,” says the artist.

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To date, Van Aiken has created and displayed 75 trees in museums, community centers and private art collections across the country, including Newton, Massachusetts, Pound Ridge, New York, Short Hills, New Jersey, Bentonville , Arkansas and San Jose, California. You can see their location here.

As the project developed, it had more goals. In trying to find different varieties of stone fruits to create the 40 Fruit Tree, Van Eyken realized that for various reasons, including industrialization and the creation of huge monocultures, people are losing diversity in food production. He says those endangered, vintage and local varieties that were less commercially viable are disappearing. He saw this as an opportunity to somehow preserve these varieties. In addition to keeping these varieties in his nursery, Van Eycken grafts them into the 40 Fruit Tree. Also, when he plants the 40 Fruit Tree, Van Eycken goes to local farmers and growers to collect stone fruit varieties and graft them onto the trees. Thus, they become an archive of the agricultural history of the place where they are located, as well as a means of preserving old and local varieties, says Van Eycken.

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“My trees were a huge hit with the local deer, but luckily I discovered garlic and mint repellents and we solved the problem,” says the artist. “People who have my tree at home have told me that it produces the perfect amount and variety of fruit. So instead of having one variety and one tree that produces more fruit than you can process, my tree provides the optimal amount of fruit of each of 40 varieties. Because all these fruits ripen at different times, from July to October, you don’t have to worry about where to put them.”

Why 40

The artist says the number 40 has been used throughout Western religion to represent an uncountable number. “Being interested in this idea of ​​an abundance of fruit coming from one tree, 40 seemed appropriate,” Van Eyken says.

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