pear

dreaded callory pear ... aka bradford pear ...

get rid of it ...

ken

Sorry, I concur. Callery pears: Bradford, Cleveland, Aristocrat, whatever. Horrible things. We have two, planted in our front yard by the developer, and I would give my right arm to get rid of them. Husband will never kill a tree.

They have a tendency to split in high winds and from the weight of snow and ice. They sucker like crazy. They reseed terribly, at least in our area. They bloom for a week -- big deal. They have actually been designated as invasive in the Kansas City area now. Most nurseries don't even sell them.

Sorry, I concur. Callery pears: Bradford, Cleveland, Aristocrat, whatever. Horrible things. We have two, planted in our front yard by the developer, and I would give my right arm to get rid of them. Husband will never kill a tree.

They have a tendency to split in high winds and from the weight of snow and ice. They sucker like crazy. They reseed terribly, at least in our area. They bloom for a week -- big deal. They have actually been designated as invasive in the Kansas City area now. Most nurseries don't even sell them.

Thank you for everyone's help & advice. The only thing that I can remember when buying the trees as they didn't say they were a fruit tree. If they did I never would have bought it. Unless their is another name for a pear tree, then they did not have the correct name on the trees. I do have another tree that I purchased at the same time & it is a white dogwood.

Callary or Bradford pear trees are NOT fruit trees. (edible fruit) They are your typical ornamental tree found in box stores. I ordered several seckle pear trees from an online nursery and when they were mature enough to bear fruit, SURPRISE. They were Bradford pears. The tree you posted on another thread is also a cherry tree, but it is an ornmental cherry, not an edible one. It's very common to see fruiting trees bred for the ornamental market because apples/pears/cherry/plum have exquisite flowers. That, and dogwood are found in every spring tree display I have ever seen in a box store. This picture is without a doubt a Bradford pear. I have them growing wild in my woods thanks to their invasiveness off trees planted somewhere close enough to them a bird can poop the seeds out.

Thank You Everyone for all your help. Also thanks calliope for taking the time to explain it all to me. I know completely understand how I ended up with this....horrible tree. My husband is not going to be thrilled when I ask him to cut it down....

My husband is very upset with me & said we are not removing this tree as he likes it. Anyone have any idea on how I can convince him that it needs to be removed now why the job would be a lot easier.

Yeah, post a better picture of the first pic. Looks like a co-dom with a ver poor crotch angle.

Leave it and you'll have a larger tree that will be more expensive tree to replace, not to mention you're starting over while investing that time in the tree to grow.

What is the fall color like? Only some selected varieties have decent fall color while most have an ugly pale yellow/green fall color. If a tree has multiple negative features and poor fall color they should be destroyed immedidately.

If there is anyone on this forum that lives near you, I bet they'd volunteer to cut it down for you for free.

I suspect all of us have had our Bradford pear tree whether we will admit it or not, simply because they can be quite beautiful and in our area even the municipality planted them as street trees. Most of them are long gone, and self destructed. LOL. You can always let him enjoy it until it reaches the point it also self-destructs and you have to shell out three to four figures to have it professionally removed. A farmer down the road from us had one (prolly the parent to the ones in my woodlot) and it lived to a ripe age, as Bradfords go. It was just breathtaking in spring. It really was. It just 'shattered' in a storm. Looked like someone dropped a bomb on it. And it was respectably large when it did and took some effort to clean up. I can understand his reaction to the suggestion of a group of folks in the internet neither of you know. I left a mulberry tree grow on a property I owned in town on a city lot, and knew better. It overhung a property on a lower terrace level and I am ashamed now that I chose the privacy it provided instead of considering it was where they parked their cars. I ended up having to remove it when it started eating up the roof and dropping berries in my gutters. I got by cheap at four hundred bucks, when I could done it a few years early with my own drain spade.

Out here nice fall color is typical from named forms of Callery pears planted in numbers along streets and in parking lots. Except in regions where these seed out into woods etc. the main issues are breakage and the fact that the flowers are pungently malodorous.

You can get the same leaves and flowers from orchard pears, as well as edible fruits.

You certainly can. One of my prettiest flowering trees in spring are the quince, the apricots were also lovely and the fruit trees seem to bloom in sequences, keeping the orchard area pretty for an extended time. One of my mature standard apple trees is spectacular in bloom on a good year. I suppose a lot of people are biased against fruit trees, thinking them too much work, but nobody says you have to produce fruit to eat with them. You do have to police the fruit however.

Thank you Calliope, bboy & whaas.