In 1903, several blossoms of a six-year-old Ussurian pear sapling that had bloomed for the first time werefertilized with pollen taken in the orchard of an amateur gardener... from a pear he had erroneously called Beurre Diel. Its correctname was Beurre Royal, as became evident subsequently. Five seedlings resulted and two were discarded. A seedling with very thick shoots that produced beautiful fruitwith good flavour and kept in storage until January was named 'Tolstobezhka' in 1912. Another seedling with largefruit thickly speckled with red patches on a gree background, of good flavourand autumn ripening was named ' Rakovka' in 1912. The final seedling was named 'Michurin Beurre Zimnaya' and combined good qualities of both the tree and the fruit. "This new variety of real winter pear will undoubtedly be evaluated as first-grade, very good for orchards in the central and partly also in the northern zones of the U.S.S.R.. This high evaluation of this variety is not in the least an exaggeration, if only for the reason that in our parts there has not been up till now a single hardy variety of pear, the fruit of which could keep fresh during the winter. Moreover, of enormous importance is the exceptional hardiness of the tree. During my twenty-two years of observation, not a single branch, not a single twig, was damaged by frost. The tree suffered no particular damage even in the winter of 1926/26 when the temperature went down to minus 36 C, and its stem suffered no damage whatever from sunburn..." -- from I.V. Michurin Selected Works. 1950.