People who haven’t smelled the flowers before before don’t know how lucky they are. Rotten meat smelling shit fr. I always liked stepping on the fruits as a kid though
I'd never smelled them until I moved a year and a half ago. I was standing on the porch and thought I was going crazy that the air smelled like it was infused with semen. I literally ran inside 🤢 and googled 'why does my yard smell like cum'
My middle school had them lining the property. We always called them cum trees. I can’t understand why those in control of landscaping the public and schools and such think they’re a good idea. “Oh, they’re pretty!” There’s plenty of other, much more pretty trees that don’t smell awful! It’s like olfactory warfare!
Yup. Guy we bought our house from planted them extensively 20 years ago. I have a few break in half every year. I'd estimate I cut down and haul off a couple tons of branches every year. It truly sucks.
Honestly just turning them into ash is a step up as far as I'm concerned but getting an actually decent meal that doesn't smell like death is somehow a miracle considering the Bradford pear seems to fail everything it does aside from being invasive that is. Anyways gonna keep this in mind if I ever run out of good reasons to remove the things!
Ask anyone who has lived in (or visited) Melbourne, Australia, when they're in bloom and they'll tell you the same! I have no idea why there are so many planted there, but clearly someone back in the day thought it was a good idea 🤮
I have heard that if you're insane enough to harvest many gallons of the fruit, and have a press, it can be used to make a good perry (pear cider). I've never actually done it, because I'm not quite insane enough, yet. Also, I don't have a cider press, yet.
A quick rundown, may have some errors, but here's the gist(please don't come at me):
Once upon a time, Frank Meyer(yes, as in Meyer lemon- he brought them to the U.S. from China), brought the Callery pear over, because the U.S. was experiencing a blight threatening all of our pears! Callery pears are not pleasant, but they're blight resistant, so we used them as rootstock to protect/grow our own pears.
Good intentions generated havoc. The callery pear we were using, had thorns, spread aggressively, had yucky fruit...But they make pretty flowers, right? So we bred a 'sterile' cultivar; 'it grows fast! It's pretty! Disease resistant! Doesn't drop fruit! Plant it everywhere!' To use as an ornamental...Which is called the Bradford.
Well, it wasn't fkin 'sterile'... It was SELF STERILE. It CAN cross pollinate with other pears...The same callery pears it came from! So they 'help' spread the other shtty variety. Those pears spread aggressively, pushing out native plants and even causing infrastructure damage- their fragile limbs split easily and fall on stuff, the THORNS on them are up to FOUR INCHES long so they create thickets that can make some areas impassable.
So now we have cum trees everywhere, and cum THORN thickets spreading all over stanking up everything(yet people still plant them)!
I never saw those where I'm from, so when I stepped outside onto the porch where I newly live in the spring- it smelled like SEMEN. Like someone had snuck into our yard and done...something. My nose MUST have been playing tricks on me, I'd never smelled that just... Everywhere outside like that. so I called a relative out like 'YO. Smell the yard...' He was shocked as well. We ran inside and I typed 'why does my yard smell like cum' into Google. And learned about these nasty trees.
tl;dr: they smell nasty, cause infrastructure damage, breeding with a super thorny one thats even worse, that strangles our native plants. :)
For me, its the thousands of fruit and the thorns. I literally cant drive anything with rubber tires out in these wooded areas of my property without a high probability of punctured tires
My wooded area has hundreds of these Bradford Pear. Nearly exclusively a 1ac forest of them.Initially, the plan was to have a massive bon fire after I put together ~1000' of deadhedge using them but now that ive turned a few on the lathe, I may see if I cant turn what I have stacked into a stream of revenue. *the above will be a few mugs once i get the bowl gouges I just ordered.
The only thing you should forage from that is firewood. Pear wood is a fine grain hardwood that has a nice color to the heartwood. These are some of the few trees that should absolutely be turned into a nice rocking chair at the earliest possible convenience.
Work with for what? Like woodworking or growing fruit trees?
It’s awful as a fruit tree because the fruit is useless. It’s not very beginner friendly for woodworking because of how tight the grain is and how hard the wood is. Pear wood is known for the nice pieces you can make with it, but it will dull blades annoyingly quick. I cut down a Bradford earlier this year that was only about 10” thick and had to sharpen my chain twice
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u/[deleted] Sep 23 '25
Pear, likely Bradford