Amazing Tree Can Bear 40 Different Fruits

Award-winning contemporary artist and Syracuse University art professor Sam Van Aken grew up on a family farm in Reading, Pennsylvania, but he spent his college years and much of his early career focused on art rather than agriculture. While Van Aken says that his work has always been "inspired by nature and our relationship to nature," it wasn't until recently that the artist's farming background became such a clear and significant influence, first in 2008 when he grafted vegetables together to create strange plants for his Eden exhibition.

The Tree of 40 Fruit is quite literally a fruit tree that will grow forty varieties of fruit from the family of stone fruits, including peach, plum, apricot, nectarine, cherry and the hybrid species therein. Blossoming in variegated tones of white and pink in early spring, and burdened by fruit in late summer, this work draws its significance from the number forty.

An art project featuring a live tree that bears 40 different kinds of fruit is more than just a conversation piece. The so-called "Tree of 40 Fruit" ó blossoming in a variety of pretty pink hues when completed ó is rooted in science.

Each tree begins as a slightly odd-looking specimen resembling some kind of science experiment, and for much of the year, looks like just any other tree. In spring, the trees bloom to reveal an incredibly striking and thought-provoking example of what can happen when nature inspires art. Then, over the course of several months, Van Aken's trees produce an incredible harvest of plums, peaches, apricots, nectarines, and almonds, including many you've likely never seen before.
To squeeze all 40 fruit varieties onto one tree, Van Aken is "grafting" budding branches from individual fruit trees onto one, large tree. To do this, he slices a mature, slightly brownish branch with buds from a peach tree, for instance, and inserts the branch into a matching slit in a branch on the Tree of 40 Fruit. Once the two branches connect, he wounds tape around their point of contact, allowing the bud to grow into a new branch.

Nature merged with art, this tree is the product of both artistry, science and agriculture, which is eminent that Sam Van Aken embodies nature and art into one.