I’ve been thinking about Bradford pear trees this week. They’re blooming furiously right now, as the tulip / saucer magnolias wind down and the redbuds come in. I was thinking a lot about the saucer magnolias last week —
— but this week, I’ve moved on to the stinky dudes.
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
If you’re already wrinkling your nose at the mention of Bradford pears, either because of the unpleasant odor of their flowering, or in general disregard for a tree that, once popular in landscaping, has fallen deeply out of favor and is understood to be an undesirable invasive, well, I feel you. If you’re like, Smell ya later, Pyrus calleryana, I both feel you and high-five your Latin.
I was raised up by people who knew their Latin plant nomenclature, if you get my drift. I don’t recall the precise moment when my parents’ disdain for these trees was first revealed to me, but I’m going to go out on a limb (sorry) and say that it was a springtime of my young adulthood. I had probably admired the trees with the bountiful white blooms, which seemed to be everywhere (parking lots, particularly), so I asked my mama what they were, probably wanting on some deep, tender level of my psyche to be praised for my attention to a thing she valued. She made a face and said “Bradford pear” with no small amount of scorn.
These trees, I learned, were not to be adored. They were prone to falling to pieces come the littlest thunderstorm gust. They were invasives. (There’s no question I first heard about invasive species from mom and dad.) “But the flowers!” I probably insisted. Eh…their blossoms were rather dingy, she said. There were certainly far prettier trees with white flowers.
Well, boo.
Young me might have thought something along the lines of why be so snobby about a tree that blooms, I can’t even with you, mom, but I also took this information straight to heart, and looked askance at Bradford pears from then on, and looked more closely, and admiringly, at….other things. Dogwoods, say. Star magnolias. As my interest in plants and nature grew, I was, and am, so thankful for what I’d absorbed from my plant-people-parents—what little of it I have been able to commit to memory. (And I continue to learn from them, every time I visit their house.)
More than twenty years later, what plant-people knew then has become common(ish?) knowledge. Landscapers don’t plant Bradfords as ornamental trees anymore; at least around here, they’re much better about using natives like Eastern redbuds and flowering cherries and dogwoods. And for that, we can be glad, as glad as we are to volunteer to rip Lonicera japonica, or Japanese honeysuckle—another invasive—out of the woods at Shelby Park.
But lately, every time I walk past a Bradford pear in bloom, I feel a twinge of pity. Everybody hates you now, I think. They think you smell like fish or semen and they know you have a weak branching structure and like to cross-pollinate like mad with other trees and make them more like yourself and crowd out all the more desirable native trees.
And at the same time, I find it impossible not to admire the tree’s blooms, particularly up close. I love that my backyard is full of redbuds and dogwood and native wild irises; but also I want to cast a quick, appreciative glance at this out-of-fashion flowering tree, along with all the other trees and plants waking up in March, each of them reminding us of the season’s message of renewal.
My friend Celeste, a yoga and meditation teacher and interior designer, would agree. She snipped a blossoming branch, brought it inside, and made her dining room table beautiful with it.
I messaged Celeste to say I loved seeing her show kindness to a Bradford in that way, and she replied, “I love to arrange with weeds too!” Which got me thinking about how we classify what is a weed and what isn’t, which has everything to do with the (human, civilized) beholder and the beholder’s priorities, and nothing to do with the so-called weed’s inherent properties, which are sometimes medicinal, and often quite aesthetically lovely. I was reminded, too, of a recent Instagram post from the biologist and writer David Haskell, in which he suggests that how we talk about invasive plants could use further reflection.
He writes:
It's Bradford Pear Bloom time! This tree gets a lot of grief from conservationists as a so-called invasive species. Indeed, over much of the southern United States, these trees are very good at sprouting up all over recently disturbed land, sometimes forming almost uniform canopies. But let's remember why this species of tree is here in the US. In 1916, the US Bureau of Plant Industry, a federal agency, commissioned Frank Meyer to go to China and gather "as large collections as possible" of Chinese species and varieties of pear. The Bureau hoped that some of these imports would have resistance to the bacterial blight that was killing off domesticated edible pears in the United States. Meyer called the callery pear a "marvel", able to survive in very poor soils. One variant of the species from Nanjing produced abundant springtime blooms and grew in a lollipop shape. Suburban America quickly adopted this variant, which we know today as the Bradford, named for Maryland plant breeder. The tree has a tendency to crack, as seen in the last photo in this collection, a downed pear after a heavy rainstorm.
At a time when immigrants are vilified in the United States, it is really important to remember how and why plants arrived here. I'm all for careful management of natural areas to encourage indigenous species, but the rhetoric of hate (you might have seen the memes) that the Bradford pear seems to produce is disturbingly like the xenophobia and racism in political discourse. When we use the same language in botany that fascists use, we've gone off course. Let's admire the Bradford Pear for its extraordinary ecological adaptability and its place in history, and when we decide to control its spread do so with respect.
And I thought about this, from Margaret Renkl’s The Comfort of Crows:
It’s true that most of what is greening up in these woods [in March] isn’t native to the American South. March is a stark reminder of how thoroughly plants imported from Europe and Asia have escaped their gardens and taken over the surrounding fields and forests. Sap is rising in the canes of Japanese honeysuckle, and sap is rising in the branches of Bradford pear trees. While our native maples and oaks are still sleeping, and the poison ivy that coils around them, too, the invasive vinca vines in the understory are waking up into greenness. I can hardly help greeting them with joy.
I refuse to quell this joy. It’s possible to understand what invasive species are doing to the woods and still feel the leaping heart of joy in the presence of greenness. … In this troubled world, it would be a crime to snuff out any flicker of happiness that somehow flames up into life.
This Saturday, March 16, is Tennessee Tree Day, a project of the Tennessee Environmental Council. All over the state, people will plant trees like Prunus americana, or American plum (“with their showy white blossoms”); Amelanchier arborea, or serviceberry; Taxodium distichim, or Bald Cypress; and Cornus florida, or American dogwood, among others. Each year, you can reserve a tree to plant for a small donation (it’s too late now, but there’s always next year).
At the same time, maybe folks will pile Bradford pear limbs in their fire pits for a spring backyard gathering with friends, because the trees make good firewood; and artists like North Carolina’s Delia Flan will be weaving beautiful baskets from kudzu and privet. (She’s working on a book about weaving with invasive vines!)
Delia is making something beautiful and useful from what’s (invasively) here, giving it new context, new life. We love to see it.
This is lovely.
This makes me so happy! I know they're invasive, and smelly, but despite these unpleasant aspects they're also beautiful. Kinda like all of us.