The Bradford Pear Fiasco | Hacker News Reader

The Bradford Pear Fiasco

washingtonpost.com

35 pointsrfreytag14 comments

I'm surprised they didn't mention that these trees STINK.

Edit: Looks like it was mentioned in the comment section in the article.

https://www.businessinsider.com/bradford-pear-tree-semen-sex...

A high school friend had one of these in front of his house…it was obviously the butt of many jokes every spring. It's nice to know what kind of tree it actually was after all these years!

I grew up in a suburb filled with Bradford pears. Every spring, the whole neighborhood smelled.

It wasn't exactly a barren area -- there were plenty of native trees. We had to rip out a lot of maple seedlings that were trying to grow into the foundation of the house or the middle of the lawn. But they went and filled it with Bradford pears anyway.

Oh, no. I read the whole article not realizing I know exactly what these trees are. There's quite a few around the bay. Apparently they don't smell that bad to some people but for me getting a whiff is like a slap in the face.

Wow, that businessinsider site is the worst I've seen in a while, and that's something considering TechCrunch (Oath family) is pestering Europeans with disgustingly non compliant GDPR popups.

> In addition, he said, invasive plants have been enabled in their spread by centuries of environmental disturbance. “If we think in our forests we are dealing with a pristine habitat, we are deluding ourselves,” he said. Peter Del Tredici, a retired senior research scientist at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, said the concept of exotic invasive species didn’t emerge until 30 years ago, even though European settlers recorded escaped plants as early as 1672.

I can't vocalize it at the moment but there's something truly terrifying about the potential implications of this paragraph.

If you have a bradford pear tree, the best thing to do is cut it down. The weakly attached limbs will fall off of the tree with no warning or apparent cause. I've seen large limbs fall off on calm, sunny days. They are very dangerous.

When you cut it down, poison the trunk immediately. Otherwise, you'll have bazillions of saplings come from the roots.

https://outline.com/ArCHfP

This is fascinating, but I missed why the trees that didn't have thorns now have thorns?

The rare thornless mutation got reversed when the trees cross-breeded.

Trees were being grafted from varieties with thorns. Once the top died the roots would shoot up a sprout that could breed thorns.

There was also cross breeding with other thorn less varieties but I believe this was mostly after the damage had been done.

At least it is sequestering carbon

Seems like it could be used for pellet stove fuel.

When we lose limbs off ours we burn them in the stove.

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