
Tree of Forty Fruit - chris1993
https://www.treeof40fruit.com/
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chucky
The image says "artist rendering", it is unclear to me whether this tree
exists today or if it's an ongoing project that expects to be finished some
time in the future (40 successful grafts would take a number of years to do I
imagine).

Edit: googling answered my own question, this is indeed an ongoing project:
[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/a-tree-
grows-40-di...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/a-tree-
grows-40-different-types-of-fruit-180953868/)

~~~
fencepost
While it's an ongoing project producing them, as of the 2015 article "Today,
there are 18 of these wondrous trees across the country, with three more being
planted this spring in Illinois, Michigan and California. Seven are located in
New York—including the very first Tree of 40 Fruit that’s still on the
Syracuse campus—and six more are in a small grove in Portland, Maine."

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Jedd
These are an awful lot of work. I've got a couple of multigraft trees, with
just 3 varieties (apples) on each, but wouldn't want anymore. Some varieties
are much more vigorous than others, so they require a lot more care and effort
with pruning and training.

Pest control, irrigation, picking are also much more complicated, as different
varieties ripen at different times (often over many months).

As I understand it there's no productivity gains either, in terms of volume of
produce per unit of (land) area. Most commercial growers have moved / are
moving towards upright trees, with dense plantings (1m spacing or less), as it
maximises the labour, off-farm inputs, and management costs versus saleable
produce.

Doesn't look as pretty as the imagined idyll, but little of industrial
agriculture does.

~~~
mikro2nd
As the linked page stated, though, the point is neither productivity nor
commercial agronomics, the point is preservation of heirloom varieties that
are precisely _not_ interesting to commercial growers. I think this is a very
important effort since it preserves genetic lines that may in the future turn
out to once again be interesting as climate change makes new and unanticipated
demands on food growing. That's not to say that we'll use those old varieties
unchanged, rather that they may contribute genetics in the development of new
strains.

~~~
Jedd
Heirloom preservation is indeed highly laudable.

Brogdale [1] in the UK has ~2400 apple, ~500 pear, ~300 cherry, and a huge
range of other edibles -- a fascinating place to walk around if you're ever in
the area. But none of them are multi-grafted. Each apple variety has two
physical specimens -- adjacent to each other, on semi-dwarfing stock, and they
re-graft and relocate every ten years or so, IIRC.

One of the researchers there told me that in the UK there _used_ to be a known
range of close to 10,000 unique apple varieties, but many are now simply lost
in time.

In Australia we've got a much smaller range available -- in the order of a few
hundred I think -- but I don't believe anyone trying to maintain a collection
is using (let alone relying on) multiple grafts on the same plant.

[1]
[https://www.brogdalecollections.org/](https://www.brogdalecollections.org/)

~~~
mikro2nd
Fascinating -- thank you. I was not aware of this collection. I'd surmise that
careful attention also has to be paid to cross-pollination requirements. Many
fruit trees require a compatible pollinator, frequently of a different variety
than itself, so it can get to be a real challenge. I can't imagine trying to
track pollination compatibilities across that many varieties.

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dougmwne
This reminds me of the Library Grape from Anathem:

"The library grape had been sequenced by the avout of the Concent of the Lower
Vrone in the days before the Second Sack. Every cell carried in its nucleus
the genetic sequences, not just of a single species, but of every naturally
occurring species of grape that the Vrone avout has ever heard of -- and if
those people hadn't heard of a grape, it wasn't worth knowing about. In
addition, it carried excerpts from the genetic sequences of thousands of
different berries, fruits, flowers, and herbs: just those snatches of data
that, when invoked by the biochemical messaging system of the host cell,
produced flavorful molecules. Each nucleus was an archive, vaster than the
Great Library of Baz, storing codes for shaping almost every molecule nature
had ever produced that left an impression on the human olfactory system.

A given vine could not express all of those genes at once -- it could not be a
hundred different species of grape at the same time -- so it "decided" which
of those genes to express -- what grape to be, and what flavors to borrow --
based on some impossibly murky and ambiguous data-gathering and decision-
making process that the Vrone avout had hand-coded into its proteins. No
nuance of the sun, soil, weather, or wind was too subtle for the library grape
to take into account. Nothing that the cultivator did, or failed to do, went
undetected or failed to have consequences in the flavor of the juice. The
library grape was legendary for its skill in penetrating the subterfuges of
winemakers who were so arrogant as to believe they could trick it into being
the same grape two seasons in a row."

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jaggederest
When she was younger, my mother owned a house with an apple tree that produced
six varieties.

I understand this can also be done with citrus and grapes, as well. Pretty
fascinating that their immune systems don't cross react, I think I remember
that plants mostly use innate rather than active immunity.

~~~
FreeFull
It can also be done with plants in the nightshade family. So, for example, you
can transplant the branches from a tomato plant onto a potato plant.

~~~
dehrmann
Or tomato to tobacco.

~~~
pvaldes
Tomato mosaic virus would approve this

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pvaldes
This is a Prunus tree most probably. Could bear different varieties of
cherries, plums, mirabelles, damsons, gages, peaches, almonds, plumcots, and
pluots. All at the same time.

You can have also a tree with 40 varieties of apples and a similar good
display in spring.

It would need some watching and effort to manage it at long term (avoid
vigorous stems killing the other fruits, avoid virus spreading) but is
possible, yep. With accurate pruning could produce around 1,5 Kg of each fruit
at year or so at ten years, plus a really nice display of white and pink
flowers each spring.

It must be noted also that either the tree is specifically created by somebody
that knows what is doing, or can ve very dissapointing. Try this with Citrus
would be dangerous for example. You can't have plums and apples or pears in
the same tree. No matter how many peach varieties you graft, you can't have
peaches if your climate is not rigth for it, so this will work fine in a
computer, but you'll need to be much more astute and observant to translate
this succesfully to real life.

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shostack
So I've got an ornamental plum that doesn't really fruit. I've read it can
still be used just fine for grafts.

Does anyone have good resources on how to get started grafting to do this? I
have access to peach, apricot, cherry, apple and nectarine trees as the donor
grafts.

~~~
benj111
I don't think an apple root stock would work as its not closely related.

Additionally, theres a technique called budding[1] where you just graft
individual buds. This has the advantage of maintaining the habit and
structural integrity of the root stock.

Haven't got any good resources for you though, sorry.

[1]
[https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?pid=400](https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?pid=400)

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benj111
For Apples these are known and sold as 'family trees'.

Here's one with 250 varieties of apple. [https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-
environment-24348394/man...](https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-
environment-24348394/man-grows-tree-with-250-varieties-of-apple)

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markdown
As far as I can tell, it's only a tree of 5 or 6 different fruit, but multiple
cultivars/varieties of each.

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simonebrunozzi
I don't understand how a single tree can produce not one, not two, but a
multitude of different stone fruits.

And how would you go about making it happen? Is it a combination of "grafts"
(is that how you call them in English?) ?

