The project 'Tree of 40 Fruit', consists of a series of hybrid fruit trees. Through the graft, Van Aken, who is also an art professor at the University of Syracuse in New York (USA) has grown more than 40 varieties of fruits such as plums, apricots and cherries, in a single tree. Each tree produces 40 types of stone fruits, of the genus Prunus, which mature sequentially from July to October in this country.
"I wanted to have a tree that would bloom in different colors," says Van Aken, who learned about grafting as a child. "I saw my grandfather do it, and it was the most magical and amazing thing I've ever seen." He picked up a branch of a peach tree and put it on another tree, he said, 'wait here, and by next spring it will start to grow and it will become another branch ', and indeed that happened."
Since the project began about eight years ago, it has created more than a score of 40 fruit trees, most of them on display in North America, either in community gardens, museums or private collections (in Arkansas, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania ...). Others have traveled to Sweden and even in China.
Van Aken's intention is to manipulate nature to enhance its beauty. This type of initiative has its condition: to see if a graft has come to fruition, we have to wait for years and we must be very careful with the pruning and the strategic areas in which the grafts are placed, as well as work around the growth cycle of each fruit that is used.
Apart from the multiple colors shown by these hybrid trees, they offer all kinds of fruit in the same tree: peaches, apricots, plums, cherries, nectarines ... As we have seen, the artist 'designs' each of the trees, selecting species that flourish and produce fruits at different times of the year to take advantage of their full potential and beauty. Thus, in a season, plums and nectarines grow; in other apricots and cherries and so on.
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