When spring reaches Central New York, an unusual tree puts on a lavish spectacle, blossoming in varied shades of pink and white all at once. Come summer, this single tree bursts with an abundance of fruit in many varieties: plums, peaches, apricots, nectarines, cherries and almonds.
What may sound like a fantasy is, thanks to the ingenuity of sculptor and art professor Sam Van Aken, quite real. First created in 2008, the Tree of 40 Fruit is real, thriving and spreading its roots across the world.
“The Tree of 40 Fruit really started as an artwork,” he says. “I wanted to make this tree that would blossom in different colors and bear different types of fruit, so that when you happen upon it, it causes a moment of rethinking that becomes the beginning of a story.”
The first of its kind, this Tree of 40 Fruit brings its unique beauty to campus each spring.
Each tree is created through grafting, a process that has fascinated Van Aken since he watched it as a child on a Pennsylvania farm. “I just thought it was the most fascinating thing in the world—taking the branch of a tree, sticking it onto another tree, and watching it grow,” he says. “It is like Dr. Seuss and Frankenstein and all those amazing things you think of when you’re a kid.” Years later he began playing with grafting as art, first combining plastic fruit into hybrids, then working with real vegetables and ultimately, trees.
To begin, Van Aken scoured New York State for stone fruit, eventually leasing an heirloom orchard with University and Creative Capital grants. “It turns out that Central New York was one of the largest producers of stone fruits, particularly plums, in the 19th century,” he says, “and this one orchard contained all the heirloom, native, hybrid and antique varieties.” From it he developed dwarf stock trees, growing them in a nursery beside the Comstock Art Facility. Working with more than 250 varieties, he uses chip grafting—inserting a bud-bearing sliver into a matching incision. “I tape it, let it heal all winter, then prune it back and hope that it grows,” he says.
For me, there’s much more power in a metaphor than there is in a technology.
What began as an artwork has become both a research project—tracking when varieties blossom in relation to each other—and a form of conservation. Van Aken has gathered countless varieties of stone fruit, many no longer grown commercially. While archives and specimens survive elsewhere, he is now the only person keeping some of them actively growing. Their flavors, he says, are unlike anything in a grocery store—a reminder of how much has been lost now that fruit is bred for transport and shelf life rather than taste. “By taking all these species and grafting them onto the trees, and placing them throughout the country, I’m creating my own type of diversity and preservation,” he says.
In the years since, the project has grown more public. Commissioned by the Trust for Governor’s Island, Van Aken planted The Open Orchard—102 fruit trees grafted with some 350 varieties native to or historically grown across New York’s five boroughs. He then joined the NYC Parks GreenThumb initiative to plant 100 trees in community gardens, returning heirloom varieties to the neighborhoods where they once grew.
A close up of the various fruits growing on one of Van Aken's grafted trees.
More recently his work has taken on a global, and urgent, dimension. This summer he’s been working in Greece, learning to make botanical prints with a 15th-century woodcut method and developing an abroad program for students as part of a Plant Humanities residency. His focus is Crete—by some accounts the first place reshaped by manmade climate change, its forests felled first for trade boats and again in the Bronze Age for bronze casting. He dreams of restoring a Cretan valley to its pre-Minoan state. Meanwhile he has been invited to write three books, and a Tree of 40 Fruit is slated for Brigham Young University this fall.
Through it all, the creative impulse remains at the heart of what Van Aken does. “For me, there’s much more power in a metaphor than there is in a technology,” he says. “That’s why these things always remain artwork for me—first and foremost.” What started as a single tree has become something larger: a living argument that art can preserve, restore and—quite literally—bear fruit.
