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In Roald Dahl’s novel James and the Giant Peach, magic crystals cause a withered peach tree to produce a spectacular, juicy, house-sized peach. How nice would it be, people thought, if we could grow massive fruit in real life – perhaps without also spawning giant insect pests and having to endure villainous aunties.

By the mid-2030s, botanists had figured out how. Scientists found ways to produce oversized fruits and vegetables using genetics, and improved on James’s peach: they created crops and trees that grew not just a single species, but a variety of delicious and nutritious foods.

The Fruit Salad Tree, a tree producing multiple kinds of fruit which itself sounds like something from a Roald Dahl story, was produced commercially in the early 2020s. Grafting had been used for thousands of years to produce hybrid plants, and fruit salad trees are made by grafting branches of one tree, say a russet apple, to that of another variety of apple, say a golden delicious. Other varieties can be added, so that a single tree produces a range of different apples. In 2013, one man made a tree producing 250 different varieties of apple. Similar fruit salad trees were made with citrus fruits (growing lemon, lime, oranges and grapefruit). Yet another type produced plums, peaches, nectarines and apricots.

And then there were tomtatoes – you say pomatoes – made by grafting the roots of a potato plant to the leaves and stem of a tomato plant.

In all these examples, the hybrid is built up from closely related plants. Tomatoes and potatoes, for example, belong to the same genus, Solanum, which also includes aubergines (or eggplants). Indeed, potatoes themselves evolved from a hybridisation event involving a tomato some 8 million years ago. So it is a simple matter to make a thriving hybrid of closely related plants through grafting.

With some careful gene editing and plant breeding, by the early 2030s it became possible to make a plant able to grow fruits from different families, resulting in trees growing, for example, bananas, citrus, apples and peaches. Farmers and private growers could order the combination that most suited their tastes.

Horticulturalists also turned their hand to Brassica oleracea, the species that produces, in different varieties, cabbage, kale, broccoli, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts. It was a relatively simple matter to make a hybrid that produced all these vegetables on different parts, in a sprawling hedge.