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This Crazy Tree Grows 40 Kinds of Fruit

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One tree, forty different fruits, ripening in sequence from July through October.

Sam Van Aken isn’t a farmer or a botanist by training — he’s a sculptor and art professor at Syracuse University who spent years learning an old horticultural technique just to build something that sounds impossible. His creation, the Tree of 40 Fruit, produces peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines, cherries and almonds off a single trunk, all fused together through a process called chip grafting. National Geographic’s 2015 video “This Crazy Tree Grows 40 Kinds of Fruit” follows Van Aken through the years-long process of building one.

• Van Aken uses chip grafting: he slices a bud and branch sliver from an antique or heirloom stone-fruit tree, inserts it into an incision on a rootstock “working tree,” tapes the junction, and lets it heal over winter, adding more varieties over successive years.
• The trees blossom in spring in variegated pink, purple, crimson and white, then ripen sequentially between July and October across the 40 grafted varieties.
• Van Aken leased an orchard of historic stone-fruit varieties facing extinction in Central New York — once a major 19th-century stone fruit region — to build an outdoor nursery at Syracuse, and has since installed more than a dozen trees at sites including Syracuse University, Colby College and Portland, Maine.

The Grafting Process Behind a Single Tree

Chip grafting is centuries old, but Van Aken’s application of it is anything but routine. Each new variety starts as a sliver of bud wood cut from a donor tree, then wedged into a matching incision on the rootstock and taped down to seal the wound. The graft has to heal through a full winter before Van Aken can tell whether it took. He repeats that process, tree by tree, branch by branch, adding varieties gradually over several years until the rootstock grows into an open-centered structure with multiple primary limbs, each one carrying a different genetic lineage.

That patience is the whole project. There’s no shortcut to layering 40 distinct stone-fruit varieties — peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines, cherries and almonds are all members of the Prunus genus, which is what makes the grafting compatible in the first place — onto one root system. Anyone attempting the same thing on, say, apple stock or in a backyard container garden would run into the same species-level constraints; readers curious about smaller-scale grafting or container growing can see the contrast in how to grow raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries in containers.

Preserving Varieties on the Edge of Extinction

The Tree of 40 Fruit isn’t just an art piece — it’s a rescue operation for stone-fruit genetics that were about to disappear. Van Aken tracked down heirloom and antique varieties from an orchard in Central New York, once one of the country’s biggest stone-fruit producing regions, and used that orchard as the source material for his outdoor nursery at Syracuse. Many of those varieties had no commercial value left and were headed toward extinction before he grafted them into his working trees.

Forty varieties, one trunk, blossoms in pink, purple, crimson and white every spring — and fruit ripening in sequence from July into October.

The number 40 wasn’t arbitrary. Van Aken chose it for its historical and biblical association with abundance and infinity, a detail that fits the project’s framing as living art rather than a strict agricultural experiment. It’s a similar instinct to the preservation work behind small-scale, low-input growing detailed in living a radically simple permaculture life on 1/4 acre — using old techniques to keep something rare from disappearing entirely.

Locations of Fallen Trees

Building one tree takes years, so Van Aken hasn’t stopped at Syracuse. More than a dozen Tree of 40 Fruit specimens have been planted at museums, universities, community sites and private collections across the United States, including installations at Syracuse University itself, Colby College, and a site in Portland, Maine. Each one blooms differently depending on which varieties were grafted in and how far along the sequence has progressed, so no two trees look — or fruit — exactly alike.

The result is a living calendar. Instead of one harvest window, each tree stretches ripening across roughly four months, with different branches dropping peaches, then plums, then nectarines as the season moves along — a rolling yield that a single-variety orchard can’t replicate.