Sam Van Aken

It tastes like chicken.

Because it is chicken.

100 years ago, there were 2,000 varieties of peaches, nearly 2,000 different varieties of plums, and almost 800 named varieties of apples growing in the United States.

Today, only a fraction of those remain, and what is left is threatened by industrialization of agriculture, disease, and climate change.

The tree of 40 fruit is a single tree that grows 40 different varieties of stone fruit.

So that's peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines and cherries all growing on one tree.

It's designed to be a normal-looking tree throughout the majority of the year, until spring, when it blossoms in pink and white, and then in summer, bears a multitude of different fruit.

I began the project for purely artistic reasons.

I wanted to change the reality of the everyday.

And to be honest, create this startling moment when people would see this tree blossom in all of these different colors and bear all of these different fruit.

I create the tree of 40 fruit through the process of grafting.

I'll collect cuttings in winter, store them, and then graft them onto the ends of branches in spring.

In fact, almost all fruit trees are grafted

because the seed of a fruit tree is a genetic variant of the parent.

So that when we find a variety that we really like, the way that we propagate it is by taking a cutting off of one tree and putting it onto another.

This is definitely not a sport of immediate gratification.

It takes a year to know if a graft has succeeded.

It takes two to three years to know if it produces fruit.

And it takes up to eight years to create just one of the trees.

Each of the varieties grafted to the tree of Forty Fruit has a slightly different form and a slightly different color.