Pyrus - Growing Guide

Pear

Pear trees come in two forms; there are those which are purely for the productions of fruit and there are those which are ornamental flowering trees in their own right which also produce pear shaped fruit. We offer two varieties of each.

1. Ornamental pear trees suitable for growing as specimen freestanding plants in smaller gardens

P. calleryana ‘Chanticleer’ is a narrowly conical tree growing, eventually, to about 20ft in height. Its leaves and racemes of white umbel-like flowers, which appear in mid spring, are very similar to those of standard culinary or desert pear trees. This tree has however a number of differences in that it is often thorny and the fruits are fairly tiny, brown and rounded.

P. salicifolia ‘Pendula’ is a small tree with weeping branches. It grows to only about 15ft with a spreading ‘dress’ of about 12ft that reaches right down to ground level. It has willow-like grey felted leaves and dense racemes of creamy-white flowers in spring which nicely offset its grey leaves. Small pear shaped green fruits are found after dry summers although our plant at the nursery only performs irregularly.

Neither of these varieties will give you eating pears and neither require any formal pruning as such.

2. Fruiting pear trees for the orchard or vegetable garden often trained against a wall

P. ‘Conference’ is a dessert pear with rusty greenish-yellow pears. The tree is self-pollenating.

P. ‘Doyenne du Comice’ is partly self-pollenating and will produce a crop of large yellow dessert pears late in the season.

These fruiting pears need careful pruning and tying in to supports both to get them established and to control the growth and flowering of the tree to maximise its fruit production.