After taking painstaking care to prune and graft, notwithstanding years of patient waiting for it to grow, artist and professor Sam Van Aken has managed to help create a tree that produces 40 different varieties of stone fruits, from apricots to peaches, plums to cherries.

While the tree has potential for commercial purposes, Aken, from Syracuse, New York, thinks the project has more value as an artwork and wants to plant versions of them in different museum gardens to intrigue visitors.

Having taken years to graft, cutting branches from assorted trees and splicing them with others by inserting them into slits on a branch, the ‘Tree of 40 Fruit’ blooms in shades of pinks and purples. And now that it is summertime, it starts to fruit at different periods of the season. Check out the incredible piece of botanic art below: