As I write this, white blossoms are popping out behind my house — an old nemesis sneers at me. The Rogue Pear.
The callery pear (Pyrus calleryana) is an Asian native brought to the US in the 1960s. Why? The pears are small, round, and inedible. The flowers fill the air with a sickly-sweet odor. The trees are densely limby and prone to splitting in bad weather. Like many fast-growing trees, the callery pear is short-lived, lasting only a couple of decades or so. So why has it turned up in every doctor’s office park and subdivision? Three things: beautiful foliage– deep green in summer, leaves turning blood-red or wine-dark in the autumn; an explosion of flowers late in winter; quick growth to a bushy, symmetrical silhouette.
Horticulturalists created a number of cultivars, the best-known being the ‘Bradford’. We removed the thorns, we straightened the forms. As a useful biproduct, these cultivars couldn’t reproduce. You plant Bradfords, and they stay where you put them.
But, in our great and unmatched wisdom, we kept tinkering. Each cultivar had slightly different properties. Different colors, stronger limbs. And then it happens. One cultivar is used to landscape a new strip mall, and a different one dresses up an office park down the street. Some local bees visit one and then the other. It turns out that different cultivars can fertilize each other. And these new seedlings exhibit the attributes of the original, wild pear: able to grow on a wild range of soils, able to seed prolifically, and armed with thorns that can punch through a truck tire. I call them rogue pears, when I don’t use stronger adjectives for them.
It’s a contagion the scope of which you aren’t likely to notice until late winter. Come February until April, these innocuous green trees suddenly blaze white in floral profusion. My corner of the county is pretty well infested; a mere 10 years after being fallow, the neighbor’s field is a young forest, with 8 out of 10 trees being pears. But I didn’t have any inking of realize how widespread the problem was until I was a couple of hours away, driving on a highway skirting the Fall Line. In the pine plantations on either side, the midstory was packed with pears bedecked with their white blossoms. Some quick research showed the rogue pear has popped up in most states east of the Mississippi, and it has a foothold in several western states as well.
Everyone knows about kudzu. You may have heard of Chinaberry or privet or tree-of-heaven. Now that pear is on your radar, maybe you’ll start seeing it come the end of winter.
Maybe, hopefully, you’ll choose native trees for your next landscaping project.
Towards the Moon or To the Sun 