The Real Frankenfruit
Artist hyper-grafts an entire orchard onto a single tree
Sam Van Aken is growing a fruit orchard unlike any you’ve ever seen: It contains forty kinds of fruit, all on a single tree. Van Aken grew up on a farm, where he discovered the wonder of tree-grafting—the practice of cutting and pasting two kinds of trees to grow a new kind of fruit. An apricot crossed with a plum becomes a pluot, for example; add a peach and you get a peacotum.
Now, as an artist and professor at Syracuse University, Van Aken is taking that biological design process into overdrive. By carefully selecting dozens of species of fruit to graft onto his trees, he creates living sculptures that only show their true form on nature’s timeline.
Van Aken first toyed with this theme in a series of works in which he “grafted” pieces of plastic fruit together. It wasn’t long before he moved on to the real thing. Starting in 2011, he began the process of growing hybridized trees that each bear 40 different kinds of stone fruit. So far, there are 16 trees in various stages of growth located across the U.S.
This isn’t an entirely new idea. Some gardening magazines offer “fruit cocktail trees” that grow a handful of fruit varieties. A single one of these trees could contain multiple types of fruit (like apricots, plums, and nectarines). Nurseries also sell combination trees, combining two or more similar fruit varieties and their pollinators (like Asian and triflora plum varieties) that are grafted onto the same tree. But as far as Van Aken knows, no one has ever attempted to graft so many varieties onto the same tree before.
The process of grafting this many fruit types onto a single tree is painstaking. Years go by before Van Aken can see any results. It’s a kind of time-based media, the end result of which can only be forecast through computer-generated imagery, like the rendering above, or awaited patiently over many seasons.
It takes two to three years from the time Van Aken purchases a root stock (a plant selected for its roots) and grafts on a six-inch section of scion (a plant selected for its fruits) to when he can start grafting on multiple fruit varieties. Then it’s another year until he can plant a tree. That’s just the beginning.
Van Aken visits each tree twice a year for three years, continuing to put more grafts on each time. Inevitably, some grafts fail. It takes about five years for each tree to develop fully.
The trees bloom in the spring, and bear fruit in the summer. But it’s not easy to get an entire tree to blossom at the same time. “I had one tree that blossomed all on one side,” says Van Aken. “The other side didn’t blossom for another month.” His solution: combining showy fruit varieties that tend to have blossoms emerging within the same two week period. There’s a small window, for example, when late-blooming apricots blossom at the same time as Asian plums, European plums, and early peach varieties.
By experimenting with 250 stone fruit varieties, Van Aken has been able to find the sweet spot—and to find fruits that can be grafted onto each other. For whatever reason, you can graft an apricot to a peach, for example, but you can’t graft a peach to an apricot.
Some of the heirloom fruit varieties on each tree come from the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, New York. When Van Aken first visited the station, he discovered that workers planned to rip out the last and only orchard containing certain apricot and plum varieties. Van Aken leased the orchard, and preserved the varieties by grafting them onto his trees scattered across the country.
The other fruits come from local farmers and growers. “I go to local orchards where the trees are placed and collect different varieties to try to make the trees almost like an agricultural history,” he says. Each tree tells the story of the habitat where it lives, and serves as a reminder of the many heirloom fruit varieties that have been lost—or nearly lost—as crops become increasingly homogenized.
While making striking art is Van Aken’s priority, the ability to simultaneously enhance and protect biodiversity is an outcome he’s happy with. “I am merely attempting to create a compelling artwork and in the process preserve unknown, rare, and/or forgotten fruit varieties,” he says. The project is partially inspired by the idea of transubstantation—an idea seen in Catholicism where something (the bread and wine used in the sacrament of the Eucharist) is turned into another thing entirely (the body of Christ). In his work, a normal-looking tree turns into a blossoming ball of flowers before transforming again into a veritable farmer’s market of stone fruit.
Eventually, Van Aken wants to fulfill his dream of creating an orchard where the public can visit all of his preserved heirloom fruit varieties, and learn how to create their own hybridized trees. But he’s got plenty of time to develop his guidelines. Since trees take so long to mature, his vision of fully-grown trees exploding with blossoms and fruit will only reveal itself as the years go by.
Photographs by Sam Van Aken. Visit the project website here.
You can follow Ariel Schwartz on Twitter at @arielhs. Subscribe to re:form’s RSS feed here and follow the main page here.
