Tree of 40 Fruit planted in Tyler courtyard

Growing up on a dairy farm in Douglassville, Pennsylvania, Sam Van Aken has always incorporated the natural world into his art, developing a unique and varied portfolio that blends the scientific world with the creative. 

As a multi-disciplinary artist, his latest project will live within the city that helped spark his interest in the arts. 

“Philadelphia is like my home city,” Van Aken said. “Growing up in Douglassville, we were only an hour and change outside of Philly. I still remember seeing exhibitions at the art museum as a child that I think were incredibly important for me becoming an artist today.”

The latest in Van Aken’s series of living art pieces is the Tree of 40 Fruit, planted in the Tyler School of the Art and Architecture courtyard on March 14. The tree will produce 40 varieties of fruit, including apricots, peaches, almonds and several varieties of plums by June. Students will also be free to pick and consume any fruit the tree bears, PhillyVoice reported.

Van Aken, an associate professor at Syracuse University, has created and cared for more than 200 similar trees across the East Coast and Midwest. Not just visually stunning, each tree also supports multiple culturally significant subspecies and promotes food security. 

Each tree is produced using a grafting technique, which joins two individual plants together, allowing them to grow as one. Van Aken was exposed to the horticultural technique through family members and other farmers growing up, but the practice dates back thousands of years. Today, grafting is critical for producing genetically identical strains of food crops. 

“If you plant a Red Delicious apple seed, you could grow something completely different,” said Sasha Eisenman, chair of Temple’s architecture and environmental design program. “Grafting is essential for maintaining individual types of trees.”

The practice is used on an industrial scale to grow produce like apples, tomatoes, watermelon and nuts. Large-scale food production encourages genetic consistency instead of diversity. 

“Especially in the food sector, we’ve lost a lot of interesting diversity in favor of what is most producible and what is most sellable,” said Luke Natale, a junior horticulture major. “It’s all become economic instead of unique and interesting and cultural.” 

While the food industry uses grafting to preserve homogeneity, Van Aken saw an opportunity to use the practice to promote species diversity, especially when it comes to maintaining rare, historically significant strains. He researches varieties historically grown in the area to make sure they’ll be conducive to its environment.

Some of these tree varieties have remained genetically unaltered since before European colonization, while other strains were brought to the United States by settlers, Van Aken said.

“This became a real fascination for me because it combines pre-European history,” Van Aken said. “The irony of all this is that growing up, I thought there were red plums and blue plums. Now, I have hundreds of different varieties that I grow.”

Interspecies diversity is critical in protecting food crops from pests, diseases and climate change, Van Aken said. Certain strains contain traits that allow them to better withstand unfavorable conditions within a diverse gene pool. Some might be more adaptable to heat, while others are resistant to an invasive insect.  

“Inevitably, some type of pest or pathogen will come along,” Natale said. “When that happens, instead of losing everything, you may lose a little bit of something, but you have multiple other crops to rely on.
 And in time, maybe those plants can help build up resistance to whatever is attacking them.”

If a population lacks diversity, it increases the risk of being wiped out completely by changing climate conditions or a new disease. 

Desirable genetic traits, like drought or disease resistance, can be bred into a species’ gene pool through crossbreeding and genetic modification. Seed or gene banks are largely responsible for preserving unique samples of genetic material. 

“When we need to breed disease-resistant strains, banks serve as the source for organic material,” Eisenman said.

Van Aken’s grafted trees act as “living gene banks,” each preserving 40 unique genetic identities and fruit. Van Aken describes the trees as metaphors for our synthesis of culture, represented physically by the different fruits and flowers, each with its own cultural legacy.

“I like that it is an artwork that evolves beyond my initial preconception,” Van Aken said. “Every year I show up to a tree, and it’s a different tree than it was last year when I was there.”