City Pear
Country Pear
Bradford Pear / Country Pear 3/19 - 3/22 (2010)
Not sure why the citified Bradford Pears of the city and town are all round (they certainly aren't pruned) or if the country Pear is a different sub-species... (many are not as tall or full as this specimen)... But countrified pear are ussually ragged on the edges, and may be far less dense. They also seem to bloom a day or two earlier than the in city pears. Not sure why.
Posts
3 comments:
This is quite a story. When the Callery pear (Pyrus calleryana) was first brought over to the U.S., the only cultivar was called Bradford Pear. All of the bradford pears were virtually clones of each other, and were incapable of "selfing". It was great because none of the Bradford Pears would produce fruits, and therefore nobody every found the pears in a natural setting, only planted ones.
HOWEVER, someone had to come along and mess things up, and they came up with different cultivars of Callery Pear, which were the same species. Eventually, there were half a dozen cultivars floating around, and now, instead of just clones of one individual on the landscape, there were clones of six individuals. Guess what happened? They found each other, we capable of reproduction, and the bradford pears starting producing fruits!
Birds starting eating the fruits, spreading them around, and now we have Callery pears becoming an invasive species, mostly in the southeast, but there are a few naturalized specimens even in SE. Ohio.
There your go, a species that was quite well behaved, and after new cultivars were introduced, began producing fruits and is now considered invasive.
Tom
I'm glad to see the blog come out of hibernation
Big Thanks Tom. (I still wonder why the city mix favors the round, while the country favores the "jagged" -- It can be a hard thing to take, to find that many things I take to be a natural and beautiful part of our landscaper are, infact, transports and ivasive at that.
Post a Comment