Joris De Rycke “Garden Centre”
March 13th - April 5th, 2026
Pomology is an artistic and horticultural project by Joris De Rycke that collects new apple varieties from so-called “wild” trees growing along roadsides, railways, parking lots, and industrial zones—often sprouting from discarded apple cores. Since 2019, De Rycke has been documenting and mapping these overlooked trees. When a tree produces flavorful fruit and shows healthy growth, it can be selected for the collection.
In winter, twigs from selected trees are collected and grafted in early spring, creating genetic clones that preserve the tree’s exact qualities. These clones are grown in an orchard that functions as a living archive. Each variety is named after the site where it was found—such as Railroad, Parking, or Tunnel—maintaining a connection to its place of origin.
By 2025, the collection included sixteen varieties, primarily discovered in industrial and infrastructural landscapes around Antwerp, with new varieties added each year. Pomology explores chance, movement, and human impact on landscapes, highlighting overlooked spaces as sources of new fruit varieties and cultural narratives.
The apple has been appearing in art and culture over and over again. From depictions of the fall from paradise, to the Greek myth of the apple of discord that led to the Trojan War, depictions in vanitas paintings to today’s Apple—the co mpany that produces computers and phones—it carries enduring symbolic weight. Apples have traveled with humans across continents.
You can harvest seeds from many plants and be fairly certain that the offspring will resemble the parent. This is rarely true for apples. Apples carry a large amount of genetic information—about twice as much as humans—and reproduce through cross-pollination by insects. The structure of the flower even prevents self-pollination. As a result, each seed contains a unique mix of genetic material from different trees, producing highly variable offspring.
If you plant the seeds from a single apple, the resulting trees may differ greatly in color, taste, size, and disease resistance. A seed from a large, red, sweet apple could produce small, green, sour fruit instead.
This is why apples in commercial cultivation are always grafted. Without grafting, there would be no true apple varieties, as every seed-grown tree would be genetically unique. Grafting creates a clone, preserving the exact characteristics of the parent tree.
In Pomology, this process is applied deliberately, while hybridization is left to the chance events of the surrounding landscape. The project selects from what is already growing, then consistently manipulates propagation to preserve de-sired qualities, creating a collection that reflects both randomness and careful curation.
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☞ Joris De Rycke
