Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

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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.

Marmarated beetles for me.

A few observations:

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.

Unfortunately Bradford pears are toxic to humans (though not birds).

Everything I've found while googling about this says that they are not toxic, they just don't taste very good and are very hard.

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

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.

Some kind of Malus floribunda probably, but check also the plum Prunus cerasifera pisardii for comparison, and the serviceberry.

Cydonia oblonga has bigger flowers and in some way can remind dogwoods or even some magnolias when in blossom.

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).

> Local gardens and nurseries would sell lots of them to landscapers and homeowners.

They still do. It’s the cheapest bang for the buck tree for large scale developers across the entire US.

I have some type of pear tree in my front yard that look identical but they don't have any of these drawbacks.

Wow, that's pretty wild that those cons didn't dissuade people from propagating them deliberately!

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.

It might be, all I remember is that they explode during fires which make the fires spread faster or something. They burn really well.

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