More Frankenfruit!

Yesterday I posted about my new creation, provisionally named Frankenmato until I can judge his characteristics. Today I thought I’d share an even more ridiculous(ly awesome) Frankenfruit – the Tree of 40 Fruits.

This tree was created over five years by grafting together branches from 40 different types of stone fruit including peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines, cherries, and almonds. The tree begins the season looking fairly normal, and then bursts into a rainbow of blooms, which then produce dozens of rare and old varieties of fruit from June to October. How awesome would it be to have one of these in your backyard?!

At the time this project began I was doing a series of radio hoaxes where I hijacked commercial radio station frequencies and played my own commercials and songs. In addition to becoming acquainted with FCC regulations I also discovered that the term “hoax” comes from “hocus pocus,” which in turn comes from the Latin “hoc est enim corpus miem,” meaning “this is my body” and it’s what the Catholic priest says over the bread during [the] Eucharist, transforming it into the body of Christ. This process is known as transubstantiation and [it] led me to wonder how I could transubstantiate a thing. How could the appearance of a thing remain the same while the reality changed? And so, I transubstantiated a fruit tree.
~Sam Van Aken, Artist.