Details for: PI 665749, Pyrus hybr., Patricke Pear

When I read Ethan Natelson's narrative about the origination of the Leona pear, in my mind, I began to compare that information with our Leona (=Patricke) pear. My late mother's sister, Marie, the only surviving sibling of five, was born in 1931. She told me her father told her the pear tree we have was planted long before she was born. My grandfather, her father, told me that his father had rooted the tree from a cutting from a tree he saw at a neighboring farm. In 1930, I assume that a pear tree that arrived in the mail at the post office in Converse, La., or wherever, would have had to have been a sapling. However, my great grandfather's rooted tree was already old enough to bear fruit by 1930 and probably before that. Additionally, I mention in my book that my great grandfather had climbed the tree when he was nearly ninety. As he climbed the tree to reach limbs small enough for him to be able to shake pears from out of the top, he lost his footing and hung upside down by one foot, which had gotten caught in a fork of the tree. My uncle Tony, my Aunt Marie's brother, now deceased, told me he saw this incident, as did my Aunt Marie, when I called her this evening to ask her about it. She said she laughed "because I was too young (around 12) to know it wasn't funny." This incident has stayed in the family lore for so long because those who witnessed it were so astonished that a man of his age could still climb trees. There are no pear trees anywhere near our property anymore, so the tree my great grandfather took wood from must have disappeared years ago. But what we do have here is a live eyewitness, my Aunt, a retired professional, to the fact that this pear tree was bearing fruit years before her grandfather climbed it, and that the tree was there throughout all her memory. Since the tree is hollow, its true age can't be determined by ring count. But, suffice it to say, our tree pre-dates the assumed 1930 Converse, La. origination date by some years. Not knowing any official name for the tree, all the elders in my family just called it the pear tree. However, I can vouch with one of Mr. Natelson's observations -- "It takes a few years to come into full bearing on calleryana." The tree in my backyard that bore fruit for the first time this year also took a few years just to begin to bear, and it was rooted from a cutting, not grafted. Additionally, grafts and rooted cuttings show different growth rates, and some of them begin blooming a few years before others of similar age. -- from Michael Bourgeois, 08/2014