Just imagine, all the fruit you buy from your local farmer’s market
can now be plucked from a single tree. All this is thanks to Sam Van
Aken, an artist and professor at Syracuse University. He uses a
technique called “chip grafting” to create hybridized trees, each of
which can bear 40 different varieties of “stone fruits” (fruits with
pits).
Chip grafting is a process that involves slicing together a
piece of the tree’s branch with a bud from another tree. The bud is
then inserted into the working tree’s branch slit. This is then wrapped
with tape until the “wound heals” and the bud starts growing into a new
branch. Over the course of several years Van Aken added slices of
branches from other varieties to the first branch.
According to Van Aken, this is something he became fascinated with as a child while growing up on his parents’ farm. Last year in a TEDx Manhattan talk he said that when he’d “seen it done as a child it was Dr. Seuss and Frankenstein and just about everything fantastic.”
Now he’s finally seeing his idea come to fruition as he’s created a
tree with different varieties of stone fruits growing in tandem on this
one tree. In fact, throughout the spring his tree has blossoms in many
hues of pink and purple that then bare fruit throughout the summer.
This
is something he’s really proud of too, as he’s featured it in many of
his art pieces. The artwork shows elaborate timelines of when the
different varieties of fruit blossom, allowing him to show how the trees
flower and fruit.
All this work is a part of his ongoing project
entitled “Tree of 40 Fruit,” a project he started seven years ago. It’s
only now, years later, that contemporary artist Van Aken believes many
of his first hybrids are coming into their peek blossoms and fruits.
This is something he’s talking to National Geographic about
and has also created more than a dozen of the trees that he’s planted
at various sites around the U.S. (including museums). He sees this as a
way for him to spread diversity on a small-scale.
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