The Callery (Bradford) pear may be one of horticulture’s best example of a good idea gone very wrong. Could it happen again? Of course. Are there no other examples of plants that seemed perfect at the time, but couldn’t live up to the billing? I always had difficulty keeping our highly publicized, box-store-special Knock Out roses happy at home. What’s been your favorite, over-advertised, damn good bad example in the garden? Was it not that great plantsman George Santayana who warned “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” There might even be a good political lesson there.
Crescent Hill neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky. John Nation photo.
I got into the subject of Bradford pears because I am a diligent member of the world-famous Jeffersonville Indiana Tree Board. One of our members mentioned the city parks department was taking chain saw to a marauding band of Bradfords. Curiosity led me to that site – and others – where Bradfords were popping up just a few feet apart like an angry herd of fat, green popsicles. I had missed the show, the frothy white flowers of early spring, albeit their fishy-smell, and then vibrant red purple, orange and yellow leaves of autumn. All which made it a great sales pitch.
Bradford pear runs wild in Jeffersonville, Indiana. Bob Hill photo.
What could possibly go wrong?
My history of the Bradford pear was propagated from a Feb. 18, 2017, Arnold Arboretum article written by Theresa M. Culley entitled, almost regally, “The Rise and Fall of the Ornamental Callery Pear Tree.”
It leads off pointing out that the Bradford selection of Callery pear became one of the most popular trees in North America, only to become the scourge of landscape managers across North America. Her story asks, “What led to its fall from grace? To understand this fascinating story , we need to start at the beginning.”
That would be the end of the nineteenth century as farming was beginning to replace ranching in the United States, and with it a growing demand for improved crops that could survive the western climate. Thus, our government created the Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction Office. Promise. Which led to a guy named Frank N. Meyer spending 10 years walking across Asia, and China in the early 1900s looking for tough, useful plants, and sending back home hundreds of shipments of cuttings, and thousands of pounds of seeds. Not quite a precursor to 120 years later when China is now shipping us thousands of tons of laptops, computers, electrical components, lithium-ion batteries, video games and furniture.
Fred Meyer, USDA photo.
About the time Meyer was hot footing across Asia, our edible French pear (Pyrus communis) crops in the Pacific Northwest were being decimated by fire blight. The call went out for resistant pear cultivars, which sent explorers back across Asia to locate new species.
E.H. Wilson sent back seeds of the Pyrus calleryana to the Arnold Arboretum
Those trees grew protective spikes, were incredibly tough in almost any site or climate, and seemed an answer. So, another 100 pounds of seeds were collected. With 5,000 pounds of pear fruit required to get 25 pounds of cleaned seeds. No easy pursuit, this.
OK, moving along, these seeds were planted by the thousands in USDA plant stations in Oregon and Maryland, evaluating the trees overall vigor and resistance to fire blight. Finally, in 1952, one tree growing in Glenn Dale, Maryland with thick, glossy leaves, an attractive globular form and without thick spikes was selected as the winner. One tree 40 years after a search had begun. It was named in honor of Frederick Charles Bradford, former head of the Glenn Dale station who had initiated the tree work.
So far. So good.
The Bradford pear cultivar was grown and finally commercially released in 1961 to almost universal appeal. Medium size, rapid growth, frothy white spring color, shiny green leaves, fabulous fall colors and reasonably priced. Yes, what could go wrong?
The “wrong “part began noticeably showing up in the early 1980s. Sure, the Bradford’s seasonable beauty was apparent, but older trees began breaking apart during windstorms and heavy snow loads, crashing down in yards. Horticulture legend Michael Dirr blamed that on the Bradford’s branching structure, tight crotches that would literally split in half, too many limbs around a common length of trunk.
In response, the horticulture industry quickly came up with hardier calleryana cultivars, ‘Whitehouse,’ ‘Redspire,’ ‘Autumn Blaze,’ and ‘Avery Par’ among them. Which led to a still existing national epidemic of calleryana pears growing by the thousands in open fields, along roads and railroad tracks, and worse, in back yards. Invasive trees masquerading as weeds. You’ve seen them, too.
What was that all about?
Answer here. As with most pears, the Bradford could not self-pollinate. But it could heartily cross-pollinate with many of the new calleryana introductions. Love at first sight. The bees at work on flowers, or birds carrying fruit for miles, roosting in trees or on power lines. Defecation and millions of seedlings to follow, crowding out native trees. Parks department employees with chain saws. The Bradford pear now banned in three states, Ohio, Pennsylvania and South Carolina, with more to come. Virgina has even offered a free replacement tree in exchange for cutting down a Bradford.
And yet, drive down streets in your neighborhood in early spring and you’ll see many Bradfords still singing their song, including many downtown streets. They just haven’t fallen apart yet. Worse, Bradfords are still being sold by the thousands in some nurseries and online.
It’s a tree that still even has its defenders, as pointed out in a recent article by Jeremy Cox in the Bay Journal, a surprise offering from the Chesapeake Bay Watershed community. One person quoted made the debatable case that better to have a crowded field of Callery pears than a parking lot. The article pointed out the invasive trees can help stem soil erosion, while its hard, tiny pears to provide winter food for birds and wildlife – not counting defecation spread. Its proponents argued Bradfords do create shade, help lower urban air temperatures, and will thrive where other species will not.
Sure, just like all those damn humans.
As a garden center owner with two locations in South Jersey, I must confess that selling trees became popular for us during the ’90s and 2000s, until the financial crash of 2008. We specialized in larger trees for homeowners, installing mostly 2 1/2- to 3-inch-caliber, which is a little too big for homeowners to handle. My confession is that for most of those years from the early 90s all the way till the early 2000s all the types of pears you just described were our number one selling tree, starting with Bradford pear. Soon to see them break apart, my grower switched to what I used to describe as the new version of Bradford, as all the customers would come in and ask for Bradford, or they would come in to replace their Bradford that had broken apart. Either way, I had a new selling point. I had the same great tree at a great price, with stronger, better-structured branches, and sold between 200 and 500 pear trees each year. Until I read this article, I did not realize how the seeding problem began, as I had not noticed it in the first 20 years, when we only had Bradfords. Now retired, most of the abandoned properties I ride by are full of pear trees and fields that were part of a nursery that went out of business in 2008; that had some pear trees left in the fields, now look like pear orchards in the spring with their mass of white flowers.
Dateline: Antrim County Michigan. The friggin’ Autumn Olives are at it again. Introduced as a pretty planting for yards, it has now spread over my 40 acre farm. My wife of 47 years has become obsessed with its eradication. Hours spent attacking stalks at ground level, bleeding at the touch of those obnoxious thorns because of the blood thinners, daubing on Round-up (full strength, dyed purple so she knows she got it.) and checking the results the following year. Her countenance in the light of a roaring fire of Autumn Olive bushes reminds me of our younger years when the fires of passion burned brighter, unmuted by the passage of time. The struggle is real. And don’t get me started about the Huckleberry bushes in the yard in Indiana.
Here in southern Arizona we have our Bradford pear equivalent — Desert Museum palo verde. This popular landscape tree is a naturally occurring hybrid of a hybrid. It was discovered by the Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum’s director at the time. He noticed some different-looking palo verdes in the wild and started cultivating one that eventually became the parent for the tree now known as the Desert Museum palo verde. It’s often touted as having the best of all three species — thornless, greener bark, longer bloom period, and larger, brighter flowers. Because they are beautiful, low-maintenance, and grow fast, they are often planted by builders and in commercial spaces. Unfortunately, this tree has one major flaw that wasn’t discovered until it had already been widely planted. It grows super-fast, resulting in weak wood and a top-heavy canopy. Consequently, it’s extremely prone to storm damage, often making it a short-lived tree. Trees split apart or are uprooted during monsoon storms or high winds. Local arborists call it a “trash tree”. But nurseries still sell them, and unknowledgeable homeowners still plant them.
As long as the Callery, (Bradford) pear is administered by bees and birds, it will prevail despite the annoying splitting joints. Invasive plants are prolific because the bees and birds use them as alternates and the deer don’t eat them. Fields are drowning in Russian olive bushes. Up here in the bucolic northeast our wild blueberry bushes are plagued with witches broom, a fungal disease hampering their future success. Another wildcard in the environment is the very prolific Amur bush honeysuckle, Lonicera macckii, so similar to the diminishing native one, but this one is loved by all. I think it’s time to call it quits on our personal opinions and let nature take its course.
Yet in dry, snow-less southern Australia, I have yet to see a bradford pear ever split!
Here, the bradford pear continues to do stalwart work in hot, dry, and inhospitable situations throughout the suburbs.
Although I have noticed that it is slowly falling from fashion, as trees tend to do, and is being replaced by less attractive and even hardier native species (although not local native species! – so still interlopers in some eyes).
I doubt most Australians are aware that bradford pears are capable of reproducing themselves, let alone becoming a weedy problem, because they never get the moisture required to germinate and grow wild here.
Instead it remains a handsome and robust medium-sized tree equally at home in public parks and in domestic gardens, beloved for it’s fast growth and attractive foliage.
Once again, it becomes apparent that a weed is only a plant growing in the wrong place.