Bradford’s Main Street pear trees are beautiful. They are delicate, with slim trunks and plentiful branches. Their flowers are a blizzard of snowflake blossoms. Their glossy dark green leaves turn to warm jewel tones in cold weather.
But when it comes down to it, they stink — in more ways than one.
Sure, there’s the obvious. Also known as Callery pears, the trees flower early, when the weather still can be too chilly for bees or butterflies. Instead, they depend on less poetic insects to do their pollinating.
Like flies. Specifically, blowflies — the kind of flies that are used to calculate how long a body has been dead. That’s why those delicate white petals smell less like roses than they do like rotting fish or a decaying corpse.
On top of that, though, there is the way they have proliferated since the 1960s. They are also tenacious. The Survivor Tree — the plant that was pulled from the rubble at Ground Zero after the 9/11 terrorist attacks — is a Callery pear. Because they were cheap, easy and effortlessly ornamental, they became a landscaping favorite with the support of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Until now. Pennsylvania is banning the tree, listing it as a noxious weed. That means its sale is being phased out and in two years will not be legal.
”Banning the sale of an invasive plant is an important tool to stop its spread,” Pennsylvania Secretary of Agriculture Russell Redding said. “And (it’s) a step we take only after careful consideration of the damage it causes and its potential for continued harm to our ecosystem and economy.”
That won’t end the problem. While the plant, first introduced in the U.S. from Asia more than 100 years ago, had been bred to be sterile, as Pittsburgh native Jeff Goldblum said in “Jurassic Park,” life finds a way. Bradford pear trees have cross-pollinated and now have seeds that can be dispersed by birds and spread that way.
Kudos to the state for taking the steps that it can to weed the tree out, but this is an example of how government needs to know more about what it is promoting before it encourages the use of something the way it did with this simple, pretty plant that literally smells like death.
— The Tribune-Review (TNS)
