The Feral Bradford Pear

This is the wee fruit of a “wild” Bradford Pear, aka a cultivar of the Callery Pear.

The Bradford Pear was introduced as an ornamental in 1964 by the Glendale, MD branch of the US Department of Agriculture, an agency that clearly had **no idea** what they were doing.

The good news is that the Bradford Pear is a structurally weak tree that generally splits and falls apart by the time it’s 20 years old.

The bad news is that they are NOT sterile, as the Dept. of Ag. originally claimed.

Two Bradford Pears cannot cross-pollinate each other, BUT a Bradford Pear will cross with just about any other kind of pear out there.

The result: millions of feral Bradford Pears that have reverted to their Chinese Callery Pear roots, sometimes with 4-inch thorns.

These multi-hybrid trees now crowd hedgerows, creating walls of nearly impenetrable vegetation preventing native maples, hickories, oaks, ash, dogwoods, and redbuds from taking root.

What to do?

It’s beyond solution.

The only way to get rid of a Callery Pear thicket is with a bulldozer and then follow up with chemicals or fire. In short, you have to destroy the hedgerow in order to save it.

The small raisin-sized fruit you see here are the seeds of a great deal of evil. The fruit is hard, and will only soften with frost, at which point birds will show up to eat the fruit and further disperse the seeds.