Photos: Unusual Trees That Grows 40 Fruits At Once

A sculptor in New York has created an extraordinary tree that can produce 40 different stone fruits all at once.

 

The Syracuse University professor of art, Sam Van Aken wanted to bring back the memories of some native fruits to Americans and decided to grow multi-fruit trees using a technique known as ‘chip grafting’.

Van Aken started by taking a slice of a fruit tree that includes buds, and inserts it into a matching incision in a host tree that is at least three years old joined by electrical tape to hold the pieces together. With time, the “veins” of different trees sharing the same life energy.

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He says this process is an artwork as he is determines how the tree morphs with so much trails and failures before this success was recorded. In his word, “When I first started, I sort of grafted the branches on. So each variety blossoms at a slightly different time. I had a tree that blossomed all on one side, but looked dead on the other. From that point on, I created a timeline of when all these varieties blossom in relationship to each other. So I could essentially sculpt how the tree would blossom.” 

He has successfully created 21 ‘Trees of 40 Fruit’ all over America, with excitement he said “from the day it was planted, it seemed to have some draw for people.”

For each Tree of 40 Fruit to reach its peak, it requires nine years – five for the grafts to develop and four for the fruit to actually grow.

While recounting why he built the trees, he said: “The Trees of 40 Fruit were a way for me to collapse an entire orchard into one tree to preserve varieties and diversity. Part of the idea was to plant them in locations that people would sort of stumble upon. Once they happen upon these trees, they’d start to question why are the leaves shaped differently, why are they different colours. And then in summer, when you would see all of these different fruit growing on them, it is an artwork.”

Source: Oddity Central