Every spring, white blossoms erupt on ornamental landscapes throughout the U.S., beautiful and abundant, and carrying the smell of rotting fish. The Bradford pear is a plant whose history is as intriguing as it is cautionary.
In 1898, the federal Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction Office was tasked with importing economically important plants from around the world. The program attracted explorers like Frank Meyer, a Dutch immigrant who traveled to China on multiple expeditions. At the time, American orchards of the edible French pear were being decimated by blight. Meyer made it his mission to find a resistant species to save this beloved fruit.
He found a solution in the wild, Chinese “Callery” pear, a tough plant that can grow in standing water, thin soil, or dry stony slopes. Meyer collected hundreds of pounds of seeds. He died in China, but his dream did not. His Callery pear seeds were grown experimentally and the French pears were grafted onto them, making them less susceptible to disease.
Decades later, horticulturists noticed one of these experimental trees grew attractive white blooms and lacked thorns. It became the “Bradford” cultivar, commercially released in 1961 and soon one of the most widely planted ornamental trees in North America.
But the trees spread uncontrollably in some regions of the U.S. They cross-pollinated with other trees, fruit appeared, birds scattered the seeds, and the pear quietly escaped the parking lot islands where it was planted.
Today the Callery pear is largely considered invasive. Several states have outlawed the tree and offer programs to swap them with native ones.
This episode of Earth Notes was written by Danike Thiele and produced by KNAU and the Sustainable Communities Program at Northern Arizona University.
