In Defense of Bradford Pear (2021) | Hacker News Reader

In Defense of Bradford Pear (2021)

thefruitexplorers.com

37 pointsnkurz15 comments

I was really hoping for a defense of the Bradford pear. Specifically, a defense of the criticisms levied against it. There isn't one here.

People don't like them because the fruit is inedible to humans, they spread everywhere, they smell like sperm, and they are generally the mark of housing developments whose landscaping can only be described as lazy and uninspired. Worse, when planted by lazy people and improperly pruned in its youth, the natural growth pattern learns to it getting relatively easily damaged by storms. Without pruning, the limbs at about 8ft grow into each other, creating cracks, which make them highly susceptible to splitting at approx 20 years of age. If you search for "Bradford pear split" you'll find hundreds of photos.

This article has a lot of information about the utility of the rootstock for grafting, and history, but does zero to address why people don't like the trees. It does address the smell, but only to complain that people complain about it. What's the point of calling this a defense? It's just a history.

I'll say I'm fond of mine. I live in just such a lazy development, and my tree does a nice job of shading my front window.

I especially like the one day in early spring when it flowers but it looks like snow (until I put my glasses on).

I have it professionally cut back every decade or so, and the tree has survived almost 40 years. Eventually it will die and I'll be really sad.

Not much of a defense, I suppose, except to say that I don't find its smell too noticable. It's lazy landscaping but it's nice enough for me.

> I was really hoping for a defense of the Bradford pear.

The article explains clearly the advantages: Pest resistant, spectacular bloom and fall color and self-sterile so fruits weren't a problem and it was not invading until many decades later.

> they smell like sperm.

To be fair this is a problem shared with common pears and nobody complains. The cultured Pear tree smell like fish in bloom to me. The flowers are gorgeous. Photinia Red Robin has the same problem and is widely planted also.

Small inedible fruit is a feature, not a bug. If you put a common pear tree in a sidewalk and don't remove the 250g fruits, the people will start to slip in the mashed fruit and you will have a lot of broken hips. And pears attract wasps also.

In any case you can obtain the same effect with crabbaples and replace it by a tree that smells good, has a wider palette of colors and is less prone to split. They will drop a thousand of small fruits still and (unlike callery pear that is very plague resistant) they are prone to several diseases but not so prone to split in two if they are pruned correctly

Oh, and Cornus rubra is awesome also. Extra tough wood but sadly fragile to fungal diseases. You have several good replacements.

I think your criticism is mostly correct. The "defense" is mostly to say that the blame should be spread between the Bradford Pear, the birds that are spreading it, and the other species that are cross-pollinating it. It's a good history, though!

There might be a little more of a defense in the follow up article, which isn't clearly linked from this one. It's still mostly a deflection rather than a defense, but it does included suggestions for intentionally cross-breeding it to make a larger, edible, less invasive fruit: https://www.thefruitexplorers.com/blog/making-callerybradfor....

Grew up with like 20 of these around my backyard. It was my primary chore half the year to cut and stack them.

When dried properly, they burn crazy well though.

Is there any precedent for using existing rootstock for grafting at a large scale on publicly-owned trees? E.g. I know you can also graft che trees onto osage orange, but I've never seen it done in a large public park with lots of osage orange trees, only by rare fruit hobbyists in their backyards.

Don't park under one, in November.

Just sayin'...

I recently parked under a tree at my in-laws and came away with my car utterly covered in sticky rotten fruit... after googling some pictures of the bradford pear, I think that's what got me!

It's disgusting stuff, sticky as hell, stinky, and gets wedged into the soles of your shoes.

Sounds like it. It looks like an incontinent buzzard suffered a disappointing series of bowel movements over your car.

If you set aside the anti-anti-Bradford Pear rhetoric this is a pretty interesting article. If we don't treat "non-native invasive" species as enemies in a total war (a war we are almost certainly doomed to lose) then there are ways to take advantage of them, as the article describes towards the end.

To me the longer-term question of how to (re-)establish a kind of equilibrium between natural evolution and humanity's interactions with it is fascinating.

The late E.O. Wilson suggested setting aside half the Earth for natural systems ( https://www.half-earthproject.org/ ) which FWIW seems like a good idea to me, at least in theory (putting it into practice seems, uh, tricky though.)

It seems to me that we're going to need to garden much of the Earth one way or another.

I don't care. They fucking stink in the spring. They don't smell like "sperm", they smell like rotten fish. There must be a gene that lets some people smell it but not others.

Yeah, I can't smell them but my wife can. That was on her list of reasons why we had ours taken out. I supported the decision because it was growing like crazy blocking sun for everything around it and was expected to split at any time.

Had one which was over 10 years old in my backyard, it's HARD to maintain because of the way it grows. It grows fast, dense, and tall with too many limbs which are too weak, because of how dense it is it catches all the wind, even moderate wind sounds like a storm when you are beside it, and is VERY prone to breaking.

And the f*kin needles which are SHARP and can get over 2 or 3 inches long are dangerous and a pain when trimming branches.

F this tree, I would take any native state tree over these.

These things are everywhere in Georgia, so they're hard to miss.

If you dismiss the few weeks of rotting fish smell, they're gorgeous trees in spring. Huge white blooms, nice canopy. People still plant them despite the invasiveness (they'll definitely drop seedlings in your yard).

The biggest problem with Bradford Pears is that they're incredibly susceptible to wind damage [1,2]. After about seven or eight years of age, they can be felled by even the lightest wind storm. These are a fairly big species, and they'll take out your fences or whatever else is nearby when they go. Don't park your car by them.

[1] https://newgarden.com/notes/why-not-to-plant-a-bradford-pear

[2] https://www.nashvilletreeconservationcorps.org/treenews/why-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com