If there was ever an impossible project to come true, it had to be the mythical tree of a thousand fruit. Although not quite a thousand, Sam Van Aken has managed to produce over a dozen trees that can bear forty different kinds of fruit. The trees have been planted around the United States and are only a few years old, but with each blooming season, the true beauty comes forth. Each tree springs to life with purples and pinks based on the different kinds of flowers required for the forty different fruit.
The Trees of forty fruit have provided some unique information as well as unique looks though. We have been able to study the different times and ways that these types of plums, peaches and nectarines actually produce fruit. Many of them have different times that they come into season or pollenate. But even more unique has been the invaluable preservation that this crossbreeding of trees has resulted in.
The tree isn’t just eye candy, with all the colors and fruit it offers each season, but more importantly is many of these fruits are rare strains, which only exist in a few places anymore. This makes most of the sixteen current trees that are scattered throughout private collections, and community centers, preservationists. They hold some rather antique or ancient strains of fruit and over forty kinds at that.
It was this preservation of such antique fruit trees that had pushed Sam Van Aken to start the project in the first place, as he chose from over 250 different kinds of trees from his own orchards. Overall, this makes the project equal parts focused on beauty, conservation, and even research. And that is a rare thing to pull off with a single tree, but so is pulling off forty different kinds of fruit from that single tree too.
Source: http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/artist-creates-hybrid-tree-grows-40-fruit-article-1.1887459
