European pear

Family

Rosaceae

Habit

Tree

Height

15 m

Spread

10 m

Growth

fast

Lifespan

130 years

First yield

after 6 years

Full yield

after 8–10 years

Yield per plant

up to 200 kg a year

Yield in cultivation

up to 22 t/ha

Energy yield

1250 kcal per m² a year

Hardiness

zone 4–9

Shade tolerance

partial shade

Soil

Sand, Silt, Loam, Clay

Soil moisture

dry – very moist

pH

6 – 7.5

Synonyms

Birnenbaum, Birne,

Planned in gardens

4×

Times apply to the northern hemisphere in a temperate climate and shift with altitude and cultivar.

Edible: Pears are eaten raw, cooked, dried or pressed. They consist of about 83 per cent water, around 10 per cent carbohydrate and 3 per cent fibre, and contain less fruit acid than apples, which makes them milder and easier on sensitive stomachs. They are climacteric fruits: they go on ripening after picking, and precisely there lies the craft — pears left to ripen on the tree go mealy from the core, while those picked at the right moment develop their sugar and aroma in the store. The eating window is short, in some summer cultivars only two or three days. Cooking pears and wild pears stay hard and tart and are meant for compote, pear bread, dried fruit and perry; their high tannin content is what gives perry its structure. Boiled-down juice makes pear syrup, fermented juice makes pear brandy and, in parts of Central Europe, perry wine.

Medicinal: The plant was utilized for treating old injuries, while its seeds were consumed to provoke vomiting for colic therapy.

Other uses: Pear wood is heavy, fine and evenly structured, hard and remarkably dimensionally stable — it barely moves once dried. That makes it the classic wood for drawing instruments, rulers, type cases and printing blocks, and for furniture, turnery and musical instruments; stained black it long served as a substitute for ebony, for instance in piano parts. The leaves yield a yellow-brown dye. Outdoors the pear matters beyond its fruit as a structural tree: standards on seedling rootstock grow old and broad-crowned, develop cavities and deadwood and are therefore a load-bearing element of traditional orchard meadows. In shelterbelts and field hedges the wild pear is planted for its drought tolerance and deep root system.

Site: The pear flowers in April and therefore early — a frost hollow at the foot of a slope costs the crop every other year, while a slight slope or the shelter of a house saves it. What stands nearby is decisive: pears are self-sterile and need a second, simultaneously flowering cultivar within reach of the bees. Just as important is what must not stand nearby. Pear rust alternates between pear and juniper; savin and Chinese juniper in the garden or next door are the cause of those orange leaf spots, and without the juniper the fungus disappears. Fireblight attacks quince, hawthorn, rowan and cotoneaster alongside pear; in fruit-growing regions outbreaks are notifiable. On size: on a seedling rootstock the pear becomes a 15-metre tree living over a century, on quince it stays at three to four metres — that, not the cultivar, decides space and ladder length. Care: Pears take less pruning than apples and answer hard cutting with steep water shoots that carry nothing. Prune moderately in winter, and tie steep shoots down rather than cutting them out. On quince rootstock lime in the soil is a problem: leaves yellow between the veins, and not every cultivar is compatible with quince at all — the only remedy is an interstem, which must already be there when you buy. Young trees need a stake, a vole basket and, where deer are about, a wire guard against fraying and bark gnawing. The commonest mistake is at harvest: pears are picked at picking ripeness and ripen indoors, whereas on the tree they go mealy from the core outwards. Keeping cultivars want cool, airy storage, and the eating window is often only a few days. Against pear sucker no spray helps; encouraging earwigs and withholding nitrogen do.

Mainly propagated by grafting onto quince rootstocks to improve growth habit and fruit quality. Seeds can be sown fresh in autumn or after 8 to 10 weeks of cold stratification at around 1 °C in early spring. Germination takes several weeks. Seedlings are grown in pots or protected areas during the first year and planted out in late spring or early summer. Cuttings and layering are rarely used.

Flowers provide nectar and pollen for bees, beetles, and other insects, serving as important early-season food for pollinators. Fruits are eaten by birds and mammals, aiding seed dispersal. The tree offers shelter and nesting sites for birds. Young plants may suffer from browsing by wildlife.

Special features: drought and pollutant tolerant; often grafted onto quince +aroma Pears (special varieties) are very productive as espalier fruit and easy to harvest: one farm shows yields of almost 60t/ha with 6100 trees/ha; Alexander Lucas (+storage pear); Conference (+yielding pear) Brought to us by the Persians, Greeks, Romans.

Central Europe, southeastern Europe and western Asia. The cultivated pear is not a wild species but a crop of hybrid origin: it arose from several wild species, above all the Central European wild pear (Pyrus pyraster), the western Asian Pyrus syriaca and the south Mediterranean snow pear (Pyrus nivalis). It was first cultivated in western Asia; Neolithic finds document it around Lake Constance, and cultivation in Greece is attested from about 1000 BC. After the end of Roman antiquity it declined sharply and was taken up again by the monasteries from the 7th century onward; the great wealth of cultivars dates from about 1750. Today the pear is grown throughout the temperate zones of both hemispheres.

As a crop the pear has no natural habitat, but its requirements betray the origin of its parent species in the open woodland, woodland edges and scrub margins of western Asia and southeastern Europe. It wants a rather dry, warm climate and deep, fertile soil with good water supply free of waterlogging — pears root markedly deeper than apples and draw their water from below, so they cope better with summer drought while failing on compacted and wet ground. Their sensitivity lies at the other end: flowering in April falls into the late frost period, and frost hollows regularly cost the crop. The naturalised wild pear is a species of warm oak woods and hedgerows in Central Europe and is considered rare.