Some states, including Missouri and Alabama, are asking homeowners and landowners to stop planting them or to cut existing ones down and apply herbicide to the stumps. South Carolina, Ohio and cities including South Bend, Indiana, have banned or are banning all commercial varieties of Callery pears. Neither is Newport News, Virginia, which got rid of its Bradford pears in 2005. All are so pretty, hardy and insect-resistant that they were planted nationwide.īradford and other Callery ornamentals are the third most common trees of 132 species planted along New York City streets-more than 58,000 out of 650,000 as of 2015, the most recent count, said city parks department spokesman Dan Kastanis.īut the city is no longer planting them, Kastanis said. Other seedlings grew into 24 more ornamental varieties. Invasive varieties of Callery pear have been reported in at least 33 U.S. "Very few trees find pine trees congenial mates, but this remarkable Calleryana pear occurs at times quite plentiful in open pine forests, on sterile mountain slopes," USDA plant explorer Frank N. The location, described as "near Nan chang yen, Hupeh, China," may have been in Nanzhang county in Hubei. Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Library, Special Collections, shows an unidentified man holding a spur of a large Callery pear tree next to a pine tree during an expedition to collect plants in China for the USDA, on March 31, 1917. That variety was commercially available by 1962, Culley and Hardiman wrote. By grafting its cuttings onto roots of other Callery pears, they cloned an ornamental line they named Bradford pears. In 1952, USDA workers noticed a spikeless mutant growing among Callery pears started from seed. history.Īnd, just as researchers had hoped, grafting edible pears onto Callery roots produced blight-resistant fruit trees. Hardiman wrote in a 2007 BioScience article about the plant's U.S. pear orchards, University of Cincinnati researchers Theresa M. Meyer, an agricultural explorer who brought 2,500 species of plants including his namesake Meyer lemon to the USDA in the early 1900s, called the Callery pear wonderful, noting that it survived drought and poor soil.Īt the time, a bacterial disease called fire blight was devastating U.S. Credit: Courtesy of USDA via APīut Frank N. Meyer, who died in 1918, sent an estimated 2,500 species of plants, including his namesake Meyer lemon and Callery pears, to the United States. Meyer on Mount Wutai, Shanxi, China, on Feb. Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Library, Special Collections, shows USDA plant explorer Frank N. Cutting off bark in a circle around the trunk kills most trees. Trees sprayed with herbicide regrew leaves. When he cut or mowed them, new sprouts popped up. Then he enrolled it in a USDA crop reduction program that paid for planting 29,000 trees as wildlife habitat.Ĭarlisle realized the spiky flowering pears were a problem in 2019. ![]() Until 2015, Carlisle rented his field to a farmer. Indiana is among 12 midwestern and western states that have reported invasions, though most are in the South and Northeast. "They're a real menace," said Jerrod Carlisle, who discovered that four trees in his yard and one at a neighbor's had spawned thousands on 50 acres (20 hectares) he was turning from cropland to woods in Otwell, a community of about 400 in southern Indiana. Department of Agriculture webinar in 2020 about Callery pears including the two dozen thornless ornamental varieties sold since the 1960s. "Worse than murder hornets!" was the tongue-in-cheek title of a U.S. ![]() Now, their invasive descendants have been reported in more than 30 states. Bradford pears and 24 other ornamental trees were developed from Callery pears-a species brought to America a century ago to save ravaged pear orchards.
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