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Bradford pear has lost its favor with gardeners
Journal Photo by Walt Unks
Nothing is quite as showy as the oval-shaped Bradford bursting into bloom.
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Published: March 21, 2009
If you experience the change of seasons on your trip from the parking lot to the mall, it's spring. The Bradford pears are in bloom.
The tear-drop-shaped trees, coated in a cloud of white flowers, can be found blooming in shopping- center parking lots -- stranded and forlorn-looking, even in their glory.
Once touted as the second most popular tree in America next to the flowering crab apple, the Bradford has spiraled steadily into disgrace.
It seemed as if the Bradford pear might be the perfect tree when it was introduced in 1963. It is a selection of the Callery pear, a tree first collected in China by the French missionary J. Callery in 1872.
The tree was introduced to the West in 1908 by E.H. "Chinese" Wilson, a famous plant explorer who has dozens of Asian plant introductions to his credit.
Callery's first named cultivar
In this country, the Callery pear was introduced with the hope of supplying a rootstock for fruiting pears that would be resistant to the disease fireblight.
By grafting the fruit tree onto the resistant rootstock, the tree has a measure of protection against the disease. The Bradford pear selection arose from this seedling stock of Callery pears at the USDA experimental plant station in Glenn Dale, Md.
It was named for FC Bradford, a former horticulturist at the station, by Frank Creech, a fellow employee who selected and named the tree in his honor. The Bradford was the first named cultivar of the Callery pear.
The tree exhibits dense and compact branching, forming a perfect tear-drop shape, like the flame at the end of a candle.
The dense habit makes it perfect for sitting in parking-lot islands and narrow street and sidewalk medians. It not only covers itself in flowers, it is among the first trees to bloom, making it a white beacon on the landscape.
Early flowering trees are a boon to nurseries. Spring is when people shop for landscape plants, and if it's in bloom it sells.
With age, the downside
Though it flowers profusely, the Bradford pear is sterile -- no messy fruit dropping on the ground. The leaves are glossy and leathery and turn to deep maroon in the autumn.
Best of all, the Bradford is a tough street tree, seemingly immune to the multiple insults of the urban landscape: heat reflected from pavement, compacted soil and drought. The perfect urban landscape tree is planted far and wide.
As the Bradford pear ages, however, it begins to show another side. That same dense habit that gave the tree its compact form holds a problem at its core.
The branch collar, that point where the branch of a tree joins the trunk, tends to overlap on the Bradford, so that wood grows over the bark of adjacent branches creating a weak spot, what arborists call "inclusion." The weak joints cause the trees to split down the middle when they face stress -- a heavy load of snow or a stiff wind in a thunderstorm.
Horticulturalists hated to give up on such a good thing, so they tried to develop a variety of Callery pear that exhibits stronger branching habits.
They introduced varieties such as Aristocrat and Chanticleer in their quest for a sturdy ornamental pear.
In the process, the sterility that the Bradford pear exhibited when matched with a clonal replica of itself was lost and the tree started to set fruit.
Now, the Bradford pear is considered an introduced invasive in much of the mid-Atlantic and Southeast.
Many municipalities are removing Bradfords and replacing them with other trees.
In Winston-Salem, there are not any planting restrictions for Bradfords.
Planners in the Washington area no longer allow the tree to be planted in subdivisions.
So what are the better alternatives?
The choices are many, from Asian dogwoods and cherries to North American natives such as the fringe tree.
My personal choice is the Serviceberry, also known as shadblow or shadbush. It is a native tree with early white blossoms and a fine oval spreading crown. It bears pea-size fruit that is a dusky red color and attractive to birds. The tree is adaptable to a wide range of soils and exposures, and the wood is strong and resilient in storms. Fall colors range from red to golden yellow.
A well selected tree is one of those rarities in life -- a thing that gains in grace and beauty as it ages.
■ If you have a gardening question or story idea, write to David Bare in care of Features, Winston-Salem Journal, P.O. Box 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27101-3159, or send e-mail to his attention to gardening@wsjournal.com.
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