Ed: We are writing this in November but you will start reading it after singing, many times "…and a partridge in a pear tree". I don’t know why the partridge is there but I was recently clearing our kitchen shelves of things that are way beyond the "use by" time, including a quart of pear preserves. The art of home-preserving pears has gone the way of many things that demand a good deal of "hands on" labor in their preparation.
Actually, very few of us have pear trees in the yard anymore, or have friends who offer us bushels of pears toward late summer and fall. The Bradford Pear—a hybrid of a European pear (Pyrus communis) and an Asian one (P calleryana)—is being used by landscapers, but only for the flowers. The fruit is about the size of your thumb.
Back in an ‘04 article Leon and I discussed and argued about the pear breeding craze among French and Belgian estate owners back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It reminded me of the "tulip craze,” when wealthy people were competing to find the "just right" plant. Even the great Charlemagne had pear orchards. The process used back then was what we now call "mass selection" rather than plant breeding. They would select a few trees that produced acceptable fruit, collect thousands of seeds, and hope to get a few better trees. The art and science of genetics was a thing of the future, but they had a good understanding of plant propagation by rooting cuttings or by grafting onto a rootstock.
Leon: In another article you and I argued over my maintaining that mass selection was a pretty good system. Planting large numbers of pear or apple seeds would eventually result in pretty good trees for our area.
Your objection was largely based on the unsuitability of our climate to apples and pears. Well, a few years ago I went along with my wife, Marie, to an international economic botany meeting and was able to visit with the man who has been tracing the original source of our apples. No, it wasn’t in the Garden of Eden. It was a not-very-good crab-apple that grew in the valleys of the Caucasus mountain area. The climate was generally very mild, meaning that the original apple was well suited to our Southern climate. People moving into northern Europe gradually selected for apples that tasted better and grew well in the cooler climate. The man, whose name I can’t remember, said that the European pear (Pyrus communis) also came from somewhere in the Middle East and was gradually selected to do well in France and Belgium. The Asian pears came, not surprisingly, from somewhere in Asia.
Now for the point I want to make that will be shot down by Ed. Back in February of ‘03 I was talking about an old apple book that described some of the better apple varieties being grown down here back in the 1800s. It seems that large-scale cotton and sugar cane farmers were competing to find apple trees that would produce well down here in Louisiana. The trick was to plow up an acre of good land, buy a pound of apple seeds from a cider mill, and plant them. This should produce around 20,000 seedlings. Each year you could cull out the plants that didn’t do well and in around six or more years you might be down to a few trees that had apples that were good for eating, pies, or cider. Consider how many farmsteads we had down here and you can see the excellent odds for getting some very good varieties. The book describes the Bayou Sara strawberry as "conical, yellow with red stripes, flesh tender, juicy, and good". A Mr. Felts was growing it near Bayou Sara in 1860, but it is lost forever. Other popular varieties were Covington (1860) and Kosciusko (1898). The point I was making for apples is also valid for pears. We could develop some excellent pear varieties that would produce well down here, but it would take a long time and a lot of work.
Ed: So Leon has had his daydream. The Bayou Sara strawberry, and probably some pear selections, died out because there was no industry to support them and because improved shipping conditions made it easier to get good varieties from areas that were already producing good fruits. Today, those old varieties would probably find a niche as backyard or farmer’s market fruit. On the other hand, various diseases and insects would have developed by now, making them difficult to grow. European-type pears are grown commercially in only a few parts of the country–some areas in the Northeast, around the Great Lakes and on the Pacific slope of Washington and Oregon. Pear trees are not as adaptable to differing soils and climates as are apples. The fruits are more difficult to market and store, and several insects and diseases are more prevalent on pears than on apples. Even Johnny Appleseed couldn’t get any pear trees spread around. I have read accounts, though, of the old French pears that were planted by the early fur hunters, some known to be over two hundred years old and gigantic in size. Unfortunately the fruit quality is pretty bad.
When I was at Cornell some fifty-odd years ago, there were still breeding programs on both apples and pears, with the seedling trees grown at an experiment station in Geneva, New York. Apple seedlings were evaluated for ten years, with selections being made of some, the others discarded. Pears were given twelve years to be selected or discarded, but there are still nowhere near the number of pear plantings in New York as apples. And I am not aware of any successful introductions of new pear varieties, although several new apple varieties have made it. Pear trees require a lot of care.
Leon: I seem to recall from my distant youth that there were plenty of pear trees in the neighborhood and we could get a few pretty-good pears before the squirrels did. Well, to be honest, back during the depression, squirrels were a popular component of gumbo—we hardly ever saw a squirrel in the neighborhood.
Ed: Those depression era pears were called "sand pears" because of the grit cells that develop under the skin and around the core. These were almost first-generations of European pears hybridized with Asian pears. The Asian pears (several species) were introduced to English gardeners through the efforts of the Royal Horticultural Society of London, which brought in several kinds under the names, "Chinese Pear" and "Shalea". French and Belgian growers began to hybridize and select favorable seedlings. One variety developed in France in 1846, named Le Conte, is the earliest on record, but there are several different trees called Le Conte. Back when I was involved with fruit breeding at LSU I was still growing a pear under that name. The fruit was not bad eating when ripened on the tree. When ripened at lower temperatures, the quality was equal to that of pears imported from Oregon. Going back to Leon’s dream of good pears being grown down here in the nineteenth century, I remember reading about a Georgia version of the Le Conte variety from "back then" that has been described as "being poorer in quality than Kieffer, if that be possible for an edible fruit."
Leon: Aha! That was the name of the pears we used to sample back in the thirties.
Ed: Kieffer is one of the great unknowns. It was a seedling found in Pennsylvania and is clearly a hybrid between a European and some kind of Oriental species. Kieffer made a superior tree, had good resistance to pests, was widely adaptable, and fruited without another variety to pollinate it. The real Kieffer was used only for preserves. They were "preserved" with sugar because the ripe fruit had a taste compared to a raw potato. You won’t find the Kieffer recommended by the Extension Service, because newer hybrids, such as the Mixon, Maxine, and Baldwin varieties are much better.
You may have noticed some Asian pears in our supermarket produce sections, probably a response to our changing populations and tastes. You might want to try them, they are not "buttery", like the European pears, but many are crisp and juicy. I used to pick them when I was hot and dry in the orchard during the summer and was refreshed by a few bites. Asian pears aren’t really pear shaped. Most of them look more like brown apples and are very juicy, almost watery. I remember one variety that I grew had a Chinese name that translated as "Fragrant Water Pear.” I think that is a pretty good description.
Leon: I get the last (short) word. Ed and I do agree that Louisiana is not going to develop a commercial apple or pear industry. He believes the reason is that those trees are not adapted to our climate. Obviously, he is wrong. The real reason is that nobody is going to invest fifty or sixty years into finding well-adapted varieties.
Ed O’Rourke, Jr. and Leon Standifer, are in agreement often enough to be the authors of Gardening in the Humid South (LSU Press, 2002).
