Tree of Forty Fruit

The image says &quot;artist rendering&quot;, it is unclear to me whether this tree exists today or if it&#x27;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).<p>Edit: googling answered my own question, this is indeed an ongoing project: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smithsonianmag.com&#x2F;innovation&#x2F;a-tree-grows-40-different-types-of-fruit-180953868&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smithsonianmag.com&#x2F;innovation&#x2F;a-tree-grows-40-di...</a>

These are an awful lot of work. I&#x27;ve got a couple of multigraft trees, with just 3 varieties (apples) on each, but wouldn&#x27;t want anymore. Some varieties are much more vigorous than others, so they require a lot more care and effort with pruning and training.<p>Pest control, irrigation, picking are also much more complicated, as different varieties ripen at different times (often over many months).<p>As I understand it there&#x27;s no productivity gains either, in terms of volume of produce per unit of (land) area. Most commercial growers have moved &#x2F; 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.<p>Doesn&#x27;t look as pretty as the imagined idyll, but little of industrial agriculture does.

This reminds me of the Library Grape from Anathem:<p>&quot;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&#x27;t heard of a grape, it wasn&#x27;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.<p>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 &quot;decided&quot; 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.&quot;

When she was younger, my mother owned a house with an apple tree that produced six varieties.<p>I understand this can also be done with citrus and grapes, as well. Pretty fascinating that their immune systems don&#x27;t cross react, I think I remember that plants mostly use innate rather than active immunity.

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.<p>You can have also a tree with 40 varieties of apples and a similar good display in spring.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;t have plums and apples or pears in the same tree. No matter how many peach varieties you graft, you can&#x27;t have peaches if your climate is not rigth for it, so this will work fine in a computer, but you&#x27;ll need to be much more astute and observant to translate this succesfully to real life.

So I&#x27;ve got an ornamental plum that doesn&#x27;t really fruit. I&#x27;ve read it can still be used just fine for grafts.<p>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.

For Apples these are known and sold as &#x27;family trees&#x27;.<p>Here&#x27;s one with 250 varieties of apple. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;av&#x2F;science-environment-24348394&#x2F;man-grows-tree-with-250-varieties-of-apple" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;av&#x2F;science-environment-24348394&#x2F;man...</a>

As far as I can tell, it&#x27;s only a tree of 5 or 6 different fruit, but multiple cultivars&#x2F;varieties of each.

I don&#x27;t understand how a single tree can produce not one, not two, but a multitude of different stone fruits.<p>And how would you go about making it happen? Is it a combination of &quot;grafts&quot; (is that how you call them in English?) ?