! Alert

Due to a planned New York Harbor closure and planned street closures in Lower Manhattan, Governors Island will close at 3PM on Friday, July 4, 2025. More info.

Due to a planned New York Harbor closure and planned street closures in Lower Manhattan, Governors Island will close at 3PM on Friday, July 4, 2025. More info.

Sam Van Aken’s The Open Orchard comes to life to restore biodiversity

Cli­mate change impacts ecosys­tems in ways that might not be vis­i­ble if you don’t know what to look for. Species and habi­tats can dis­ap­pear with­out mak­ing a sound. 

Sam Van Aken, a sculp­tor and mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary artist who is the Grad­u­ate Pro­gram Coor­di­na­tor for the School of Art at Syra­cuse Uni­ver­si­ty, wants to rein­tro­duce us to what we don’t know we’ve lost. Cli­mate change and indus­tri­al­ized agri­cul­ture have reduced the bio­di­ver­si­ty of plant life in the Unit­ed States to a shock­ing degree. While a cen­tu­ry ago the U.S. boast­ed over 3,000 dis­tinct vari­eties of peach tree, there are now under 100. In his new project, The Open Orchard, Van Aken seeks to restore and pre­serve some of New York’s lost bio­di­ver­si­ty and all its deli­cious ben­e­fits. The Open Orchard will plant 50 hybridized trees on Gov­er­nors Island, each one bear­ing mul­ti­ple vari­eties of peach­es, plums, apri­cots, cher­ries and apples once native to the area but that have since dis­ap­peared. His vision for the project com­bines artis­tic expres­sion and envi­ron­men­tal stew­ard­ship into a sprawl­ing pub­lic art­work that’s also a shared resource for gen­er­a­tions to come. 

The ancient art of tree graft­ing, which Van Aken uses to cre­ate his hybrid trees, involves stitch­ing mul­ti­ple fruit tree vari­eties togeth­er into a sin­gle tree that bears dif­fer­ent fruit on each of its graft­ed branch­es. The results are not only beau­ti­ful and deli­cious (trees burst­ing with rain­bows of flow­ers and yield­ing entire fruit sal­ads) but an inge­nious way to pre­serve van­ish­ing fruit vari­eties. Van Aken is already grow­ing 200 of these trees in a nurs­ery on Gov­er­nors Island. When The Open Orchard is plant­ed over the next few years, 50 of them will remain on the Island to cre­ate the art­work, which dou­bles as a ful­ly func­tion­ing orchard, and 150 will be dis­trib­uted to com­mu­ni­ty gar­dens across the city to spread the ben­e­fits of the project and fur­ther safe­guard the includ­ed varieties. 

We launched a Kick­starter cam­paign to help us bring The Open Orchard to life, and we hit our fund­ing goal! We’ve intro­duced a stretch goal to donate 100 more trees to NYC com­mu­ni­ty gar­dens. Learn more and help us plant the seeds of this remark­able, vital project here. Thank you to every­one who has backed the project so far!