Creating a story about a multi-grafted tree reverting to its rootstock (producing only the original rootstock fruit type rather than grafted varieties) is a myth; while reversion is theoretically possible, it is extraordinarily rare—millions of grafted trees are produced annually, and reversion has not been documented in practice.

Artists in former communist Poland after the transition to capitalism (early 1990s) were labeled 'dissonant' and it was illegal for them to make art; they held clandestine exhibitions in living rooms and abandoned buildings, risking jail time and passport revocation if caught; young people from the US witnessing this recognized art's political importance in a way Americans typically dismiss.

Apple viruses and stone fruit viruses are prevalent in both Canada and the United States, making virus-indexed scion sourcing a critical practice for multi-grafted tree production.

Commercial fruit tree nurseries and orchards (particularly in Ontario, as described by Kamyar) commonly use Myrobalan rootstocks for stone fruit because of their high compatibility across fruit varieties.

Sam has been growing apple varieties for approximately 10-11 years at the time of the show, which is not long enough to measure the rootstock-scion diameter mismatch phenomenon comprehensively.

There is a Tree of 40 Fruit growing at High Park in Toronto that was started a couple of years ago and is still in its growth phase; COVID-19 delays affected the project, but it is expected to mature within a couple of years.

Every multi-grafted Tree of 40 Fruit sold is customized for the specific geographic and climatic location; some customers request specific fruits they want included, though most allow Sam creative freedom; he researches historical fruit varieties from the region and sources them from USDA germplasm collections or UC Davis Foundation Plant Services to ensure virus-free stock.

Rootstock diameter does not directly communicate to the grafted variety that it has been grafted, so the grafted variety doesn't always 'know' it's on a rootstock, which can lead to some size mismatches between rootstock and scion as trees age.

The main limitation of multi-grafted fruit trees from an industrial agriculture perspective is that they produce a limited number of fruit continuously across a 4-5 month season (June through early October) rather than a large uniform harvest all at once, making them impractical for mass agriculture but ideal for home gardeners who can pick 20 pieces of fruit per week at peak and have fresh fruit for 12 weeks.

Sam Van Aiken started the Tree of 40 Fruit project because his great-grandfather grafted fruit trees (whom he never met but family described as having magical capabilities), and growing up on a farm then attending art school, he merged both influences by wondering if he could control how tree blossoms appeared in spring to sculpt the blossom of a tree.

Sam grows the multi-grafted trees in square planters for the first 2-3 years, then root prunes them and transfers them to larger containers, gradually working up through progressively larger containers before planting in the ground; he grafts 15-20 varieties onto each tree before they are planted in soil, because once trees exceed 1-1.5 inch caliper size, they take longer to establish in the soil than saplings.

The Tree of 40 Fruit produces blossoms in a carefully sequenced color progression: starting with white blossoms from apricots and Asian plum varieties, followed by pink blossoms from red leaf plum varieties, then dark crimson, pink, and white blossoms from peaches and European plums, creating clusters of blossoms on branches that look like little clouds—a visual effect achieved by deliberate placement of each variety on specific branches rather than random arrangement.

Grafting cannot successfully join apples with stone fruits (or other inter-family fruit combinations) because at a base level it comes down to cellular structure incompatibility, and even if grafts like pear-to-apple might succeed for a few years, they eventually fail.

Sam is working with a Japanese biotech firm that has found a natural way to graft inter-family plants, and on a smaller scale they're working with plants to graft bouquets of flowers that can continuously grow, suggesting future possibilities for cross-family fruit grafting.

In upstate New York over the past 6-7 years, erratic weather patterns have required Sam to grow fruit varieties from colder zones than his location because successive frosts (not cold temperatures themselves) kill blossoms; for example, January or February 75-degree weather causes trees to blossom early, then spring frosts kill all the fruit, so later-blooming cold-hardy varieties mitigate this risk.

Sam Van Aiken's grandmother had an enormous black cherry tree on her farm that required her husband to spend weeks during harvest trying to prop up branches to prevent the tree from splitting under the weight of fruit.

Sam is working on a Spanish mission peach tree project for Arizona that traces and collects historically authentic Spanish mission peach varieties introduced to North America via the Camino Real (the royal road from Mexico City through New Mexico where Spanish missions were built); Native Americans cultivated these peaches for 200-300 years and traces still exist, making it a living reconstruction of agricultural and colonial history.

Growing fruit trees inside a commercial building is possible but challenging and requires either dropping the temperature below 45°F for at least 1,000 hours annually (to trigger dormancy and bud reset) or building a controlled glass house greenhouse that can simulate seasonal temperature cycles.

In China, commercial warehouse operations successfully grow two crops of peaches annually by artificially controlling weather conditions inside warehouses, demonstrating that technology can override natural seasonal constraints.

Sam's artwork beyond the Tree of 40 Fruit is primarily available on his website (samvanaiken.com) and at Ronald Feldman Gallery; interested viewers and collectors can browse his work and contact him directly through the website.