Trees of Endangeredstan

Central Asia is possibly the region of the world least on most people's radar (despite its proximity to that perennial focus, the Middle East), but it is a center of diversity for many, many fruit crops, and as such has genetic resources which could prove critical for future breeders of such things as apples, almonds, walnuts, peaches, pomegranates and many other crops. It also has environmental degradation, unstable governments, and widespread poverty, which threaten those resources, many of which have never made it out of the region thanks to nearly a century of Soviet rule and isolation.

Flora & Fauna International has compiled a "Red List" of endangered fruit and nut species in the area. Critically endangered species include pears, hawthorns, currants, and barberries. Some of these things are down to a single tiny population.

Red List of Trees of Central Asian

An interesting read about a bunch of species I at least hadn't heard much (or anything) about.

Kid's version of the Endicott pear story...

Not real fancy, but still kind of nice. I can appreciate any attempt to get kids interested in horticulture. It held my two-year-old's attention for nearly a minute, which is about 45 seconds longer than almost anything else I've tried this afternoon.

A Tree Grows in Danvers (USDA-ARS)

Speaking of fruit trees and extinction...

Ancient pear tree to face the chop for flood scheme (Town Crier)

I'm not sure a 100 years old really counts as "ancient" (the 600 year old 'Saijo' persimmon in Oomachi, Japan is what I think of when I think of an ancient fruit tree) but it's still sad it needs to go.

Australian New Crops Newsletter

Just came across a collection of on-line issues of the Australian New Crops Newsletter, from 1994-2002. Lots of different crops are discussed as well as the practicalities of developing new crops, both as industries and as species.

Here are a few selected articles...I just glanced through and picked out a handful I thought might be relevant to my readers (most are quite brief):

Nashi Fruit (Pyrus pyrifolia)
The Trials of New Crop R&D: Getting the Germplasm
Longan (Euphoria longan)
Kakadu Plum (Terminalia ferdinandiaana)
Edible Indigenous Nuts of Papua New Guinea
Beach Plum (Prunus maritima)
Australian Native Citrus

Another cultivar named by the public

It looks like another breeding program has left the naming of a cultivar up to the public: The Canadian pear breeding program put the name of a new release up for a vote, and the people have spoken. The former HW614 is now Harvin Sundown.

New Pear Christened Sundown (The Toronto Star)

Where I work, we'll frequently have a "contest" internally to solicit potential names from employees, but ulimately, it's the breeder's call.

Bartlett Parrot?

A little while back, my two year old daughter and I were grocery shopping when she reached out of the cart and snagged a pear.

"That's a pear," I said, pointing to it.

"Parrot?" she replied. She has a puzzle with parrot in it of which she's rather fond.

"No, that's a pear," I said. "A Bartlett pear."

"Bartlett parrot," she said firmly, and cradled the pear lovingly against her chest. She refused to be parted from it from that moment on. The possibility of a brief separation at the check-out counter induced a bit of panic before the cashier's creative scanning technique averted disaster. She held it in the car, eventually falling asleep in her carseat with the thing still in a deathgrip in her little fingers. This is my daughter who eats no fruit at all unless tricked. I put baby and pear to bed together when I got home, and the pear briefly became a part of our family.

Luckily, she soon lost interest in her Bartlett parrot, who was starting to get a bit loved-to-death by the end, but it got me thinking just how surprisingly little I actually eat pears. I don't know why, but if I extrapolate from a small, highly unscientific poll of friends I can conclude that this is in fact the case with EVERYBODY IN THE ENTIRE WORLD. (Okay, so my methodology is a little suspect.) Anyway, I think pears tend to play the role of the forgotten little brother of the more popular apple. Everybody knows him: he's always around, he looks a lot like his brother, but nobody really bothers much with him. I could understand this with some of the other members of the family, like medlars or quinces. The average person on the street couldn't tell you what a quince looks like, what it tastes like, etc. But everyone, including people who never eat them, knows what a pear tastes and looks like (heck, we even use the term "pear-shaped" as a descriptor for all sorts of other things).

Pears once held a top spot in the pantheon of fruit. They are among the oldest cultivated fruits, dating back many thousands of years. In roughly 3,000 BC, a Chinese diplomat named Feng Li caused a scandal among his peers by ignoring his duties in favor of tending pear trees (versions of this story place it in 5,000 BC and include growing peaches...the details get a little muddy after a few millenia.) The pears Feng Li was tending were probably rather different than the "standard" pears, being "Asian Pears", probably of the species Pyrus pyrifolia. The European Pear, Pyrus communis is of somewhat uncertain origin, as much like its sibling the apple, it is quite possible it is a composite of a variety of local species, native to eastern Europe, Asia Minor, or the Middle East. Its history of cultivation is not quite as long as its Asian counterpart, but the pear has still been grown in Europe since at least 1,000 BC. Homer praised them as the "gift of the gods" in The Odyssey in roughly the eight century BC, signalling the beginning of a long era of popularity for the pear.

The Romans, in particular, had a real passion for the fruit, and spent a great deal of time and effort studying its culture, classifying and identifying varieties, and spreading the trees to the far reaches of their empire. Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History identifies the roughly forty varieties known to him in the Roman Empire (I say roughly, because I keep finding conflicting numbers...38, 39, 41. The only copy of this text I could come up with is in Latin, which doesn't help me. Anybody knows for sure, let me know.) A few hundred years later, Palladius lists 56. Most of these varieties are lost to us, or at least their identities are. Folks in Dark Ages Europe apparently had better things to do (like die of bubonic plague or kill each other in petty wars) than keep track of fruit varieties, and most of the Roman fruits appear to have lost any specific identity at that point in history. Still, at least a few existing cultivars are known to have come down to us from that era, and a few are specifically mentioned by Pliny or Palladius, such as 'Jargonelle', which was known to the Romans as Numidianum Groecum, and 'Petit Muscat', known then as 'Superba'. (A number of cultivars of ancient origin are preserved at the USDA germplasm repository in Corvallis, Oregon, which maintains an interesting page about some of them, including the equally ancient Asian cultivar 'Tse Li', here.)

Like apples, pears today are vegetatively propagated by grafting to rootstocks, though chance seedlings found at one point or another in history comprise almost all of today's cultivars. Pear trees grow to a mature height of roughly 30 feet, but under normal culture practices are rarely allowed to exceed 18 feet or so (tree size can depend greatly on the choice of rootstock, training system, and pruning regime). The flowers are similar to that of the apple, and generally require a pollinator variety for fruit set. The fruit structure is similar to the apple, too, in that the flesh is mostly hypanthium fused to the ovary tissue. The gritty texture of pears is caused by hard, lignified cells called brachysclereids, though the degree varies between genotypes (Asian pears are less gritty and more apple like in their flesh...lots of folks like this about them, but I think it makes them more like bland, boring apples and less like pears). Asian pears are round, while European pears are, well, pear-shaped (the technical term is "pyriform", but that just translates literally to "pear-shaped", so why bother?).

With all the similarities between the pear and the apple, it's not surprising to find the two are closely related. Both are members of the family Rosaceae, and are in fact members of the same subfamily, Maloideae (which they share with more obscure fruits including quince (Cydonia), medlar (Mespilus), loquat (Eriobotrya), and mountain ash (Sorbus)). Compared to apples, though, pears are more widely adapted, and on many farms have served to fill the corner of the orchard where other plants have failed to thrive, being more tolerant of shallow or poorly drained soils, even tight clay hard-pans. Pears tend to be longer lived and more productive than apples under the same conditions.

Early settlers in the America's brought both apples and pears with them from Europe, and early on the two enjoyed a rough parity in popularity, though both were consumed mostly in their liquid forms, cider and perry. Pear production in the New World took a major blow, however, with the appearance of fire blight in the Hudson Valley of New York in the mid 1700s. The disease, caused by the bacteria Erwinia amylovora (I wrote my M.S. thesis on it!) effects many Rosaceous crops, but none worse than the pear. By the time the efforts of breeders and modern chemistry had come up with ways of managing the disease, large scale pear culture was gone from the east. In the dry climates of the west, inhospitable to the bacteria and outside of its likely range, however, the pear thrived.

The top pear cultivars are all at least hundred years old, most much more than that. 'Bartlett', which accounts for roughly three quarters of American production, dates to at least the 17th century, when it was grown by a man named William Stair. Though he named the cultivar 'Stair', a horticulturist named Williams soon renamed it after himself. After a trip across the Atlantic, another enterprising nurseryman, Enoch Bartlett of Massachusetts, again renamed it, and, again, for himself. In fact, some people believe that the original 'Stair' was actually the pear referred to by Pliny as 'Crustuminum'.

Following 'Bartlett' in the rankings are 'Anjou', 'Bosc', 'Comice', and 'Kieffer', all of which are well over a hundred years old. The last is in fact a hybrid of P. communis and P. serotina, the Chinese Sand Pear. While it's popularity has waned somewhat, 'Kieffer' was introduced in 1876 and enjoyed a good run despite unimpressive fruit quality due to its superb resistance to fire blight, and remains common canning variety.) Red sports, or mutations, of many of these cultivars exist and can often be seen in the market. (USA Pears maintains a nice little site with information about the common varieties.)

It's striking to me how little impact modern breeding has made on pear cultivars. Looking at the list of the top nine cultivars grown in the U.S. in 1993 (If you're interested: Bartlett, Anjou, Bosc, Comice, Kieffer, Clapp's Favorite, Seckel, Hardy, and Winter Nelis), every single one is listed as a major cultivar grown in California by Edward Wickson in his book, California Fruits (my edition is dated 1914), and even he notes that Bartlett completely dominated the market in that era as well.

Maybe that's because the current pears are just so darn good. Or maybe it's because nobody is eating them anyway, though I suspect some one must be buying them, despite the striking survey results. They're on my next grocery list.

(By the way, I'm sorry there isn't more on Asian pears in here: I don't know as much about them and I don't like them as much. But, to be fair, it must be said that they are the hot new thing in the U.S. these days, and are being planted in impressive numbers and sometimes even sold for even more impressive prices. I think they remind me of a potato dipped in pear juice and disguised as an apple. But that's just me. If anyone is dying to hear more on them, I'll drag out the file and write something.)

Update: I switched the "Fruit Image of the Day" from 'Kieffer' (which was a recycled image from earlier, anyway) to 'Bartlett', from the National Agricultural Library's collection of pomological watercolors. The full online collection of pear paintings is here. Some truly beautiful artwork.

Update 2: My nifty 'Bartlett' image looked like hell at that particular size, so I scaled it down so it's pretty again. I don't know why it looked so bad that big (the original is much larger than that). Oh well.

America's Oldest Fruit Tree

Like many woody perennials, fruit trees can live essentially forever if they're sufficiently lucky. Over the course of years, though, diseases kill trees, storms knock them over, people cut them down, and lightning strikes. The actual odds of a fruit tree surviving for a hundred plus years is pretty small (the original tree of Newtown Pippin, possibly the first truly "American" apple cultivar, died in 1805 from over-harvesting of cuttings for propagation!). Those that make it through a couple hundred years are usually pretty ugly by the end.

The original trees of a number of apple cultivars lasted a very long time: the Ribston Pippin, a popular British apple from the Victorian era, originated from a french apple seed planted at Ribston Hall in Yorkshire in about 1700. The original tree was blown down in a storm in 1810, but was propped up and continued to bear fruit until 1835. A shoot from the base of this tree eventually became a replacement trunk, and this bore fruit until another storm blew it down in 1928, which was apparently the end of the venerable tree.

The original tree of another British apple, the Bramley cooking apple, still stands in Nottinghamshire today. Planted sometime between 1809 and 1815, the tree bore its first crop in 1837. By 1900 it had been neglected and fell over, but re-rooted and was eventually restored to health.

Americans have had their own long-lived plants as well. The original grapevine of Concord, planted around 1850, still stands by Ephraim Bull's farmhouse in Concord, Massachussetts. An apple tree planted by Peter Stuyvesant in 1647 was still fruiting when it was struck by a derailed train in 1866 (I'm guessing that was the end of the tree).

But America's oldest known fruit tree stands behind the GTE-Sylvania plant, at 139 Endicott Street in Danvers, Connecticut. It was there (or somewhere nearby...the tree may have been transplanted early in life) that Governor John Endicott planted a pear tree in about 1630. The tree has been through more than its share of trauma. Hedrick reports that by 1763 it was partially decayed, and between 1800 and 1934 it was damaged by no less than four hurricanes, sometimes nearly fatally so. In 1964 vandals nearly destroyed the tree, but it bounced back, and today it still produces fruit.

No one is quite sure what cultivar it is. It may just be a seedling of something. An 1852 account calls it 'Bon Chretien', but there doesn't appear to be any previous record of that name being applied to it. Mostly, it's just called "the Endicott Pear", or just 'Endicott'. It comes true from the roots, so it doesn't appear to be grafted.

Hedrick was less than impressed with the fruit quality. It's medium sized, unattractive, and coarse in texture. Still, the genotype may have some value to breeders simply by virtue of its longevity.

There are a few web sites dedicated to the Endicott pear: The USDA has a small page, and the Danvers Senior Oracle has a much longer page on the history of the tree.