March 14, 2025
Michaela Althouse/PhillyVoice
Artist Sam Van Aken and Temple University students plant a Tree of 40 Fruits on Temple's campus Friday. The tree was created by grafting various heirloom trees together and eventually will bear 40 kinds of stone fruits, including peaches, plums and cherries.
For Sam Van Aken, grafting — a horticultural practice of joining two or more plants together — is about more than just creating the best harvest. It's a way to preserve trees, particularly varieties that mostly have been lost to time.
"It's sad, a lot of (heirloom trees) are gone, but the ones that exist still carry the stories of the people that they grafted them," said Van Aken, a contemporary artist and Syracuse University professor. "As you graft these varieties and perpetuate them and keep them going, you take part in that lineage, from when they're first discovered to the person that eats them."
Van Aken, a native of Douglassville, Berks County, was in Philadelphia this week to plant one of his Tree of 40 Fruits — a Frankensteined tree that can grow 40 kinds of fruit — as part of Temple University's Jack Wolgin Visiting Artist program.
This tree, which was planted Friday in Tyler School of Art's courtyard, is largely made up of multiple varieties of stone fruits such as peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines, cherries and almonds. So far, it's made up of 15 kinds of fruit trees, including six types of peaches. Over the next five years, Van Aken will continue visiting Temple and grafting on pieces until the tree has 40 varieties. Temple will post signs explaining the tree's origins and a QR code for visitors to learn more about its various fruits.
Trees of 40 Fruits are made through grafting. Van Aken makes a one-inch, diagonal cut to a tree's base and also to a different plant. He then attaches them, allowing them to grow into one another.
Van Aken has been working on these trees for almost 14 years, planting them around the country. He starts them at his home, where he takes a small section of a tree and grafts it onto a the root system of an established tree. He lets it grow out for three years then cuts off the top, creating an open, vase shape, and slowly grafts on more types of fruit trees.
It takes about seven years to bring a tree to maturity, and each is specific to the region where it is planted. Before it goes in the ground, Van Aken travels around to growers and nurseries to collect pieces of heirloom fruit trees — varieties that hold historical or cultural significance and have been passed down for generations. He primarily works with varieties that date to before the 20th century, so each tree is also a lesson in local history.
"I've started to look at the fruit almost as cultural objects, not just agriculture," Van Aken said. "Because they need to be grafted to survive and we're dependent upon them, it's almost a symbiotic relationship. They evolve along with us."
The tree at Temple will start blooming in a few weeks. Fruit will begin ripening in June and continue until the end of September. Van Aken chose to include a large variety of peaches, because he learned in his research that they once were so common in Pennsylvania that it was considered part of a "peach belt." He also noted that peaches were grown by the Lenape tribe before most Europeans settled in the area, and were introduced to the United States by the Spanish in the early 1500s. The fruit eventually made its way up to Philadelphia through extensive agricultural trade networks.
"The varieties that this tree is growing and will grow in the future are varieties that are pre-European contact, so they're actually varieties of stone fruit that were used by the Lenape," Van Aken said during Friday's tree planting. "They're some of the first plums, peaches and apricots that were introduced into this area by Europeans, so it does really become an agricultural history of the region."
Once the tree begins to bear fruit, students can pick and eat all of its varieties, although Nichola Kinch, an associate dean at Tyler, said she also hopes it will provide produce to the school's food pantry.
In the meantime, Temple's art students are designing the cover and images to guide the provides instructions for caring for the tree. Van Aken will choose one design for the final version.
Earlier this week, Van Aken worked with students at Temple's Ambler campus on another 40-fruit tree made entirely of apple varieties. It will be planted there the fall.
For Kinch, Van Aken's trees coincide with Tyler's mission to encourage students to have creative aspirations while also exploring new scholarly ideas.
"Sam's work really does that, because he does make these beautiful trees, which are really exciting, they bear 40 kinds of fruit," Kinch said. "But he's become this historian and keeper of these different varieties, many of whom had gone to the wayside."
