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.
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
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.
Cydonia oblonga has bigger flowers and in some way can remind dogwoods or even some magnolias when in blossom.
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 :-/
They still do. It’s the cheapest bang for the buck tree for large scale developers across the entire US.
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!")
They're everywhere where I live, and it's so bad.
Some people say they smell like bleach and/or semen as well. I'd rather have Durian than Bradford pear.
My neighbors have a couple, I didn't know these before moving to the US, and the first time I smelled them was... something.
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[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.
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.
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.
> [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.
These days you can really only buy the male ones but older plantings are awful. https://www.purdue.edu/fnr/extension/ginkgo-stinkgo-are-boys...