Was on HOA board where we had a road with quite a few of these trees. They were a fortune to prune because of the numerous small branches at higher reaches. As a board, we actually hoped they would come down in storms so we could replace with something more appropriate without the take down cost (and resident complaints).
Another unqiue thing is during the summer it was not uncommon for a branch to suddenly explode - apparently some type of moisture/vapor build up in the interior.
Bradford pears were all the rage in the 1990s to 2000s. At one point HOAs thought these were the best tree. Local gardens and nurseries would sell lots of them to landscapers and homeowners.
To this day, they're all over my home state of Georgia. And they're still selected for new landscaping.
They did have a few pros:
- Look great in the spring
- Huge, lush, thick canopy in the summer
- Fast growing
But there are way too many problems:
- Kills all the grass underneath them from shade and root structure
- Seedlings and root offshoots are pervasive pests
- Produces a lot of fruit, and it's toxic to humans and dogs. It smells bad and can smear if you step on it
- Trees only live 7 - 15 years, and they leave a gnarly root system to deal with.
- Extremely prone to falling over during winds or tornadoes. Can easily damage fences, housing, etc. We had to replace our fence once because of one. Even small storms can bring down the older trees.
- And of course, everyone knows how awful they smell in the spring
I think this takes the cake for "first invasive species I've seen populate over my lifespan."
Just moved back to GA after 3 years away and asked folks what all the white-blossoming trees in meadows are this spring, as don't remember seeing so many blossoms previously.
Cherries (closest blossom I know) aren't that fruitful / clustering. Dogwoods look completely different.
> Extremely prone to falling over during winds or tornadoes.
Also kids climbing on them, from childhood experience. Weak wood.
Japanese Cherries can be much more packed with flowers than this pear (It depends on the cultivar). Both Cherries and Dogwoods are royalty on gardens, but both deploy to much wider structures that can be low branched and tend to hang searching the floor, so this Pyrus is still pretty much unbeatable for narrow streets. Palms have their own problems, like thorns, but are "designed" for streets with extremely windy areas. The problem is that palms don't survive the same frost than pears can.
There are maybe five or ten trees so narrow in their category that, unlike conifers, bring blossoms, clean relatively dry fruits, and excellent fall colour in snowy areas. Some are among the most alien things that you can have in a garden.
And all that grows in such acute angles is prone to catastrophic cracks for wind damage. It comes in the package.
Having a Dogwood that would grow fastigiate retaining the "dog wood" part, would be a revolution, but is not available at this moment (and probably will never be). Dogwoods love the 90 degrees angle. I have a maple 'Tsukasa Silhouette' that would look great, but is too small, too expensive and too delicate to be used as that.
Pears are still one of the tastier fruits in a garden, not ornamental royalty, but food royalty for sure. I just ignore the short interval of smell as a necessary tax to pay.
There are some small ornamental apples that have been in my yard for decades that look very similar dogwood. No idea about the cultivar or anything (previous owner planted them AFAIK), but they are beautiful with reddish-pink leaves and white blossoms.
As toxic like apples probably. In a small fruit that is easy to ingest whole nobody would take care of removing the seeds. Apple seeds have cyanide so if you eat a lot is unpleasant
From earlier response, the HOA I mentioned was along Long Island Sound so much more northerly. Our trees were a good 30+ years old. They were somewhat sheltered from high winds, especially when younger, by the nature of the buildings (two story row houses). It wasn't until the canopy reached a fair bit over the rooflines that they really started coming down in thunderstorms. That no parked cars were crushed was pretty much a miracle.
And spot on with the no grass underneath...and the homeowner complaints about dirt in front of their units ("if you pay to take it down and replace, we'll let you!")
It doesn’t even take wind or storms, if they get too big/spread out, they’ll sometimes just spontaneously split down the middle (one in our backyard pulled this trick and one in our front yard, but we were planning on cutting them down anyway - planted by builders and/or previous residents).
IIRC they were introduced aggressively as being a non-propagating, non fruiting tree or something, both of which turned out to be false, but by the time people realized this it was far too late :-/
Reminds me of SF planting Pōhutakawas everywhere - an NZ native tree that requires little water, don't fall over, don't fruit, etc. Except as any NZer could tell you, the reason they don't fall over is that they're evolved to grow on/around cliffs and loose earth, so they go all in on strong roots. Which mean constantly breaking roads and sidewalks. yay!
Also while they don't fruit they produce a tonne of flowers that produce a tonne of cruft on the ground :-/
Eucalyptus in southern California; railroads thought they'd be great for building ties out of, they're not, and they're extremely flammable and explode.
I always heard that burning eucalyptus wood was toxic, but now i'm wondering if someone got their signals crossed because pressure treated wood and i think creosote treated wood are toxic when burned, too? I heard it as a teen, at school they took down a couple 100' eucalyptus and said we couldn't have a bonfire because of that reason.
That reminds me of when I asked an arborist why the tree they were taking down was called a “Piss Oak”. They said wait until we drop it and you won’t have to ask. Sure enough the entire area smelled like urine for a couple hrs after they felled the tree.
I believe the polite common name is “Pin Oak” [1] a fast growing, short lived, and relatively red oak. Supposedly the smell comes from a bacterial infection that afflicts most of the Pin Oak population.
I've never been very fond of nature to begin with[0], but I never imagined becoming disgusted by trees. That's until seeing some four different tree species mentioned in this thread, whose common characteristic seems to be the aura of shite and decay that takes years or decades to break through people's desperate need to pretend that since it is nature and handles well, it must be good.
--
[0] - Specifically at human/humane, live in and breathe in and admire it scale. I'm very fond of nature at population scale, and at molecular scale, both of which present interesting puzzles and applications.
> I've never been very fond of nature to begin with
> [0] - Specifically at human/humane, live in and breathe in and admire it scale. I'm very fond of nature at population scale, and at molecular scale, both of which present interesting puzzles and applications.
I can relate to this a lot. I feel the same way about nature as I do about a tiger or a volcano; I think they're cool and I respect them, but I don't care to spend time up close with them.
I don't see why it's inconsistent for me to feel similarly about a small part of something as I do about the whole, or why it might not be rhetorically useful to help explain something by drawing a comparison between them
There's a reason people tend to burn down rain forests.
Well, two reasons: money from the cleared land, and rain forests tend to be unpleasant reserves of biodiversity with all sorts of nasty plants and flying insects that want to lay eggs under your skin.
Honestly, it's the money from the cleared land. Horrors of nature are the reason people stay away. People move in only when those horrors occupy resources people think can be put to a better use.
Yes, it's often enough dumb, short-sighted, self-destructive selfish behavior, which I absolutely do not condone. However, horror or disgust alone are nowhere near enough to get people to engage in such behavior. At most it gets people to try - and sometimes succeed - to clear invasive species out of the gardens they already have.
At least one street here got lined with those. A witty lesbian friend I was walking with identified the scent immediately, so at least the trees were good for some jokes.
Common Pear trees have also this fish smell. Everything pollinated by flies has an offensive smell in one or other way. This is bad but can be desirable at the same time (no wasps or bees in the narrow streets).
Where was this? In Maryland they would break, a lot, but I never heard of them exploding. I don't think the people in our development loved them. Certainly I had seen a few too many across somebody's lawn or walk.
Southern CT near the sound. Yes it would happen with some of the wide, low branches. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't like popcorn, maybe once every other year.
The company that I worked for, had a row of these across the primo parking spaces.
During the fall months, these parking spaces were always available.
I found out why.
If you park under one of these things in November, you come out in the evening, and it looks like every incontinent buzzard on Earth sat over your car.
I thought you were going to say something about how large branches will just pop off and crush anything beneath them at random times. This is due to how multiple branches will come from the trunk at the same point, and are weakly attached.
EDIT:
Having finally eradicated all of the ones from our land, the best method is to immediately pour herbicide onto the trunk after cutting it down. The herbicide will get sucked down into the roots this way. If you don't do this, you'll get new suckers all over the place for a few years.
How did you apply? For something fast growing / invasive like a Bradford pear, or a honeysuckle, you really need to get Glyphosate into the roots for it to die. I was taught this trick by an Arborist:
Cut the tree down and leave 4-6” above the ground. Take a small drill and put a 3/8” drill bit in it. Try to find the small hole in the very middle of the trunk and drill down into it. This is how the sap flows through the tree. Carefully spray 3-4 good sprays of Glyphosate into the hole with gloves and eye protection. The tree and gravity will take this down into the roots where they will die. The small amount of Glyophosate will stay in the roots for approximately eight years, and it won’t leak out into the soil as it’s held by them.
That makes me think of some bamboo eradication advice: You allow new growth to progress so that it consumes energy from the tricky root system, then cut it before the fresh sections can provide much in photosynthetic return-on-investment. After a few years of losing calories with each attempt, the plant runs out.
That might only work for plants with "bursty" regrowth though.
I spent 3 years combating bamboo in a similar fashion and it certainly didn't work for me. I've never experienced a more frustratingly invasive plant in my life. Even wild blackberries are easier to deal with.
You may appreciate the fact that Bamboo sprouting is edible. I add rings of fresh bamboo to my pasta dishes and is a nice touch for a summer salad.
Just use only the new stems, the parts that can be sliced with a sharp kitchen knife using your hand and reasonable force, and discard everything else.
Best advice is not planting it unless you have a lot of space and something to do with it or build --strong-- concrete root barriers. Alcatraz jail level.
Supposedly painting it on the cut end of the trunk on a periodic basis (and on the cut ends of any sprouts that do come up) is more effective than a one-time drench. Glyphosate has a pretty short half-life.
Also, a spot treatment of the ends means considerably less herbicide entering the soil.
I believe the best herbicide for many situations may very well be patience and elbow grease.
Disclaimer: While I am an avid gardener and I enjoy learning about the agricultural sciences, I am a computerologist, not a botanist, biologist, or chemist.
I don't know all there is to know about herbicides. I know there are broad-spectrum herbicides and selective herbicides, but I am only aware of two of them by name.
There's the well-known broad-spectrum herbicide glyphosate, of course, but it is absorbed by foilage and has low persistence in soil. This is why the application instructions typically say to apply in sunny weather when the winds are light and rain is not expected for several days.
Then there's tebuthiuron, another broad-spectrum herbicide. It's been almost fifteen years, now, but there was a famous case of landmark oak trees in Auburn, Alabama, being poisoned with Spike 80DF -- a specific formulation of tebuthiuron made by Dow -- by a rabid sports fan upset by the recent success of a rival. Because tebuthiuron is absorbed through the roots, has high persistence in soil, and inhibits photosynthesis, the trees were assured to die. My understanding is that this is an industrial herbicide, though, and may be difficult for consumers to obtain. It's banned in the EU.
Don't do what I did, which is to throw caution to the wind in frustration.
I was successful in killing a tree under my roofline. It was planted less than a foot away from the foundation and was difficult to prune due to its location amidst yews and aborvitaes. The trunk grew to about 3" in diameter before I decided to cut it down. I cut it down to about an inch or two above the ground. It was nothing if not insistent, though. It continued to put out new shoots and I would cull them and/or spray it with glyphosate when I noticed it. After a couple of years of this dance, I escalated things. I cut the trunk down beneath the surface so that no part of it was above the ground. I doused it with a number of chemicals based on advice I received. Eventually, it stopped putting out new shoots. Over the next few years, though, the pair of healthy, well-established arborvitaes about ten feet away on either side began to brown and die. I think it's quite likely that whatever I did to rid myself of the tree also contributed to the demise of my arborvitaes.
If I had to do it over again -- having the benefit of hindsight as well as the patience that comes with age -- I would have tried to suffocate and starve it instead of saturating the soil with something that may hang around to impose unintended consequences. Perhaps I would have had success cutting it beneath the ground and capping it with a sturdy container impermeable to light, water, and air. I would have periodically removed the cap long enough to eliminate any new branches or shoots that should threaten to breach the barrier. I would have done this until it exhausted all of its energy reserves trying to reach the light.
Cellulose is constructed from chains of glucose -- probably the most common carbohydrate produced via photosynthesis. Plants synthesize carbohydrates, store them in tissue, and later metabolize them via respiration. If one is both diligent and patient in limiting the plant's capacity to photosynthesize and respirate, I am sure it will eventually die.
I was talking about the pears, which are small, round things, and rot on the branch; finally plopping off. They make this nasty, sticky brown mess, filled with seeds. Looks exactly like [large] bird shit, but is actually a lot more difficult to clean.
This is good news. In my area the only thing worse than Bradford pears are the Mimosas. It took me ~3 years of consistent work to clear off the Mimosas from our 1 acre lot in town. And I still have to spray or hand pull hundreds of the tiny ones each season because none of my neighbors have been as diligent.
They are invasive (in the US) and grow like weeds completely taking over and crowding out native species. Having many of them screws up the nitrogen level of the soil further crowding out/killing native plants.
Other commenters have covered most of the reasons why they are awful, but my main complaint is that they will completely take over your garden beds and wooded areas if left undisturbed.
Important note: There are now hybrid species that don't have the same downsides as the original true Bradford pear. Most of what are planted now are these hybrids.
I love reading about this kind of stuff. My neighbor has a bunch of Brazilian pepper trees, and let me tell you, those things are a nightmare. Incredibly invasive, grows extremely well in our climate, no natural predators here, and they outcompete almost every other tree. I cut a branch from one that was deforming a palm tree due to the way the branch had grown.
>> But somewhere along the line other Callery pear trees and Bradford pear trees cross-pollinated and some began producing viable fruit. Birds and mammals eat the fruit and poop out the seeds, often far from the tree from which it came.
"Life ... finds a way".
... with bird poop.
The latter probably not in Jeff Goldblum's voice though.
To expand on this, many states have a large white pine lumber industry. The white pine is highly susceptible to a type of fungus harbored by currants.
The fungus does not spread from white pine to white pine, only from currants to currant, or currant to white pine, so eliminating the nearby currants protects the white pine industry.
Apparently this is no longer much of an issue. Quoting [0]:
"The federal ban was lifted in 1966, though many states maintained their own bans. Research showed that blackcurrants could be safely grown some distance from white pines and this, together with the development of rust-immune varieties and new fungicides, led to most states lifting their bans by 2003. Blackcurrants are now grown commercially in the Northeastern United States and the Pacific Northwest. Because of the long period of restrictions, blackcurrants are not popular in the United States, and one researcher has estimated that only 0.1% of Americans have eaten one. [...] By 2003 restrictions on Ribes cultivation had been lifted across most of the states, though some bans remain, particularly on the blackcurrant. State laws are enforced with varying degrees of efficiency and enthusiasm; in some states, officials effectively ignore the ban."
they're also available at a local walmart as rootstock. I bought one. If i find a nursery that has it i will buy more, but i like growing "weird" plants that no one has heard of, like soapberries, kumquats, that sort of thing.
those grow wild all over the land here, i just found out what they were called last year; although i had heard they're not edible but to leave them for birds. I'll ask the Ag Center if they're safe to eat.
Please do ask your AG center, but they’ll tell you they’re safe to eat. I make a jam of sorts with the berries. They’re not real sweet but are totally edible
> The white pine blister rust pathogen is a typical heteroecious, macrocyclic rust that produces five distinct spore stages on two different hosts to complete its life cycle. The pycnial stage consists of pycniospores, or spermatia, which are haploid spores that fertilize compatible receptive hyphae. The two sexes are not distinguishable and are simply designated plus and minus. This is the stage where genetic recombination can occur that may lead to development of races of the rust. However, the nuclear cycle (i.e., dikaryogamy, diploidization, meiosis) of the blister rust fungus has not been fully determined, but is assumed to be the same as for other better known rust fungi such as Puccinia graminis. The aecial stage develops in host tissue occupied by pycnia the previous season (Figure 6). The fungus is perennial in the pine host and aeciospores are produced annually as long as the host tissues remain alive. Aeciospores are disseminated by wind over long distances, and Ribes spp. as far as 480 km (300 miles) from the nearest known white pines have been infected.
Is it me, or does it seem like "invasive pear tree" has become a big story this spring, seemingly out of nowhere. Maybe I just don't follow news around this, but this spring there have been both local and national stories about municipalities dealing with these trees. I'm not saying it's not a story, just that I wasn't aware of it before and am wondering if it reached some kind of critical mass as a problem just this year.
It's you. :) More magnanimously, you caught the story for the first time this year. I seem to come across a story about it every year around this time ever since first learning of it a couple of years ago through the Tennessee Naturalists community I follow on Facebook. As the tree spreads, so too does the knowledge of its unflattering qualities. Awareness efforts are likely to continue until community leaders take action.
Oh damn, and I thought lemon trees were fun to prune. These can kill you and smell terrible. At least lemon trees tend to smell nice while threatening you with enormous thorns during pruning.
Somewhat worse: Krauter Vesuvius / Cherry Plum trees stain sidewalks and make a horrible mess every year.
They’re invasive, they outcompete native trees, and they have many negative attributes. The wild descendants are particularly bad because they have thorns and grow in dense hard to remove thickets.
They are also terribly brittle. Every single time there is a storm in my neighborhood, at least one person has a massive Bradford Pear split in half in their front yard (if we're lucky - if not, it's out in the road.) Builders plant them because they grow quickly, and, of course, they don't have to deal with the problems a few years down the road.
I had 3 in my yard. I never thought twice about them until one split down the middle & destroyed my carport 3 years ago. I cut the rest of that one down & the one next to it that could fall on my house. A neighbor had one split last summer & blocked the road. The wood from these trees are dense and heavy. I never walk under them anymore due to how quickly they just fall down.
The original Bradford pear tree was ideal for planting because it was thought to be sterile in that it could not reproduce. -- TFA
John Hammond: There you are. There. They imprint on the first creature they come in contact with. Helps them to trust me. I've been present for the birth of every creature on this island.
Ian Malcolm: Well, surely not the ones that have bred in the wild.
Henry Wu: Actually, they can't breed in the wild. Population control is one of our security precautions. There is no unauthorized breeding in Jurassic Park.
Ian Malcolm: Uh, and how do you know they can't breed?
Henry Wu: Well that's because all the animals in Jurassic Park are female. We've engineered them that way.
One of the more ridiculous concepts in a completely ridiculous movie. The frogs and fish that "change their sex" just change what kind of gametes they make in their splooge. Totally re-plumbing their insides would a completely different kettle of fish.
It's a plot point which drives the entire narrative. If we took out ever sci-fi element that was scientifically implausible, you'd take out a hefty chunk of sci-fi.
* At first the species being planted everywhere was considered sterile, but somehow cross-pollination with related varieties can make them produce viable fruit, then animals spread the seeds.
* The fruit is not edible to humans.
* Some varieties have nasty thorns on them, able to pop vehicle tires, and over time grow together into thickets.
When we bought our house we had 3 city trees which were Bradford pear trees. We lots two of them during rainy season. One lost a major branch. The other got uprooted. I've read Bradford tree
I'm in California. Our city doesn't allow Bradford pear trees anymore. When we bought our hour we had three Bradford pear trees. Over time we lost two of them during rainy seasons. One got uprooted and the other broke off a major branch. Both times it was fortunate that nobody was injured or property got damaged. Ended up replacing them all.
Ah, typical. Nature taking its course and, once again, humans decide they know what's better and is going in to "correct" things. Then a few years in there's the cry about the disruption that was caused, and yet even more attempts at rectification. A never-ending cycle, because we can't learn to be hands off. Well I guess the cycle will eventually end given things are always somewhat worse with every swing of the correction pendulum, so at some point it'll all just... crash.
I don't mean to blow your mind, but humans are a part of nature. One advantage we have over other species is that we can spot patterns and work collectively to fix undesirable situations or circumstances. And if our fix causes further problems, we can fix those too!
We're flawed creatures so it's not ideal, but it sure beats being at the mercy of the forces nature uses to correct things on its own, like diseases and famine.
I would submit that the very idea of "nature", as used informally, is ill-defined and frankly incoherent, and should not be used, or at least should only be used loosely within specific contexts where it does make sense (a healthy ecosystem in which human beings also thrive, which is no doubt a range), like "I love taking walks in nature". What is natural under this definition? If water from a stream natural, but is water synthesized from hydrogen and oxygen unnatural?
The only sensible definition I know of of "natural" is "according to the nature of a thing". Thus, human beings have a nature, and that nature is what determines what is good or bad for us. Arsenic isn't poisonous as such, but it is poisonous to us by virtue of our nature. We are rational animals by nature. And so, unnatural are things which depart from that nature, like the desire to eat glass or having a sexual interest in oak trees and so on. It is the nature of a thing that is the reference point that allows pathologies to be defined. By nature, we should have two arms, hence to lose or lack an arm is a defect. Similarly, psychological disorders only make sense with reference to the normative, which is defined by human nature. To say "everything is natural" renders the word meaningless, annihilating all justifiable and objectively normative statements, which is absurd. If everything is "natural", then nothing is unnatural, because natural is simply identical with everything.
And look at the state of the world with all our interventions. We may be "a part of nature", but the things we do to it are definitely not natural. We're the only ones doing collectively irreparable harm, so as not to be at its mercy.
> We may be "a part of nature", but the things we do to it are definitely not natural.
Name three.
I can think of one: we landed stuff on the Moon and beyond. I think that otherwise, nature has a hard time reaching out beyond low Earth orbit.
Other than that, I can't think of anything we'd consider massive fuckups that nature didn't do better. We're definitely tamer than anything else, considering that life itself is a mass murder fest at every scale, from molecular to planetary.
All things nuclear, gross water mismanagement, fossil fuel mining and usage, all things plastic, hunting and killing for sport and other non-nutrient-related desires, extreme resource hoarding, ... that's 6 broad areas so far; shall I continue?
The stupid part is that we're not using nuclear energy, and have irrational fear of nuclear waste relative to much more dangerous, potent, and undiscussed "conventional" industrial waste.
Also naturally ocurring nuclear reactors are a thing. On the surface, too, I'm not talking about the Earth's core here.
> gross water mismanagement
Animals do intentional and unintentional water management too.
> fossil fuel mining and usage, all things plastic
Fair enough, this is unique-ish and we are mishandling it, though the use of either isn't bad per se - rather the unsustainable use.
> hunting and killing for sport and other non-nutrient-related desires
Have you ever seen a cat?
> extreme resource hoarding
That's a fundamental thing all life does.
Keep in mind that nothing in nature is thinking forwards - all life is self-destructively greedy, and nature doesn't care if e.g. some beavers dam a river and accidentally flood a whole valley, killing themselves, their offspring, and extincting a bunch of unique flora and fauna. The stability you see, that people so love and associate with nature - it's not a fixed thing, it's a temporary equilibrium in life killing other life.
The Bradford pear is a cultivar of an imported species from Asia.
Nothing about this tree growing in North America is "nature taking its course".
Humans decided to cultivate it here, and we can choose to stop. Cycles of correction, sure, but attempting to fix problems due to introduced species seems like a worthwhile effort.
Living things have been spreading to new areas and driving others to extinction and being driven extinct for the whole history of life. It's an extremely natural thing.
We don't know that for sure though. All it takes is a single seed in an ideal condition. And that condition could've probably happened in a way that the pear wouldn't have the advantage that's caused some to name it "invasive".
But also, left alone, nature tends to rebalance on its own. Any species with a dominant advantage will eventually lose that advantage, given a few generations. Well, except for humans, who continually fight the natural rebalancing, and are only succeeding in increasingly destroying that which sustains life on this planet.
Another unqiue thing is during the summer it was not uncommon for a branch to suddenly explode - apparently some type of moisture/vapor build up in the interior.