Even if it doesn’t produce fruit, it sure is purty.
That’s most excellent!
Man, I’d love to have that in my yard. Though sadly it wouldn’t produce, too much shade.
I don’t get it…the tree looks photoshopped and nothing like the smaller trees on the site. Is this real? Is it a goal of the project? The website doesn’t offer a lot of info.
Yeah, what’s up with the blatantly manipulated image that bears no resemblance to the actual tree?
It appears to be the Platonic ideal of the tree that has a number of actual examples but none of which have grown that large yet.
My grandpa was a master tree grafter. He would have a half dozen different kinds of pecans growing on one tree.
Here’s his TED talk:
I don’t think the artist is claiming the large blooming tree is real. Rather, it seems that this is a picture of his goal. He’s only been doing this for five years. The picture in question looks like a much older tree. I agree that it’s a bad, obviously shooped picture, but I doubt he was intending to mislead anyone. I think this confusion is more an issue of lazy reporting in the months since his TEDx talk.
We still have a way to go before we can have this:
Ah, so that’s why the picture in the article looks like a render.
Great - we have a Monsanto shill here. Take your GMO and GTFO, poisoner of earth.
I can’t tell: are you being satirical, or do you actually think that heirloom varieties and grafting have even the slightest thing to do with GMO? Inquiring minds desire context.
Fruit Salad trees are genetic engineered abominations.
They both involve humans manipulating the natural development of plants; if GMOs are “unnatural” so is tree grafting, and you do know those heirloom varieties didn’t exist in nature either before humans bred them into existence.
…and now I can’t tell if you are being satirical.
This could take a while.
… okay… I can’t sit this out.
Very nearly EVERYTHING we eat has been modified from its natural form by thousands of years of agricultural manipulation by humans. Do a quick Google and you’ll see that corn, for example, looks absolutely nothing like its originating natural counterpart. You can say the same for apples, wheat, potatoes, cows, pigs, citruses, rice, berries, lettuces… I could go on forever. Without that manipulation, and the accompanying agricultural modification of our environment, we wouldn’t be able feed everyone.
I find myself perennially annoyed, however, when my organic-loving friends cite fruits and vegetables that are the product of age-old selective breeding as “GMOs” (with a self-righteous sneer, I might add). What’s more, in many cases, there’s nothing inherently wrong with genetic modification. Rather, it’s how that modification is agriculturally deployed that can make it problematic (eg: making herbicide and pesticide resistant crops so that we can deliberately overuse these environmentally-harsh chemical sprays).
So readers, when you’re at a BBQ next week and you bite into a delicious cob of perfectly-cooked, organically-farmed sweet-corn, remember: what you’re eating never existed in “nature”.
P.S. - And I would be remiss to complete this rant without recommending Maggie Koerth-Baker’s excellent article on the Lenape potato.
This Franken-tree is a crime against nature. It’s like the human centipede of the arboriculture world. Also, that planter has the same non-euclidean geometry as the sunken city of R’lyeh.
Phew, finally someone obviously performing satire. So troubling when it’s hard to tell.
