Nothing is more painful than losing an old tree in spring, loaded with blossoms. In a split-second, robins become refugees and shade-loving plants are cooked.
No, there is something equally painful. Making a bad investment in the bad boy of trees: an ornamental pear—the Bradford pear. Twenty-five years ago, I made the mistake of letting not one, but three of these bad boys into my life. I was dumb and desperate. When we bought our home there wasn’t a single tree on the south side, and we felt exposed. A local landscaper who had planted hundreds of Bradford pears all over town offered me three large ones. He promised they grew “fast.” I was impatient. In no time they topped 60 feet and gave us the privacy and cover we craved.
The wind rarely let up this spring and some days it came close to hurricane force. That’s when we heard the bang. The wind felled the last of the Bradford pear trees. Spring cleanup of that tree has been slow.
Every perennial I planted under those trees loves shade and they are now cooking in the full sun: the bleeding hearts are drooping, the Persicaria “Red Dragon” (knotweed) is having hot flashes, the Kirengeshoma palmata (wax bells) fainted and the monkshood is fried.
I’m in the middle of a plant relocation party. Consider this your invitation to come and save a plant from heatstroke and give this formerly shady lady a hand.
But who knew you could miss a bad boy tree so much? It’s like a fast, charming lover you know is no good and one day you must leave, but you just can’t seem to break it off. And you remember only the good times. How they shaded the house and reduced our air conditioning, sucked up carbon dioxide from the nearby street, reduced noise and air pollution, acted as water filters absorbing dirty surface water, lessened flooding by capturing water that would run off into the nearby Farmington River, and the list goes on… You remember fondly how they were the first to bloom every spring.
Even a not-so-good tree is better than no tree.
Then I remembered their bad habits. Bad habit number one: Bradford pears are known for their weak branching and a structure that’s prone to split. All three Bradford pears were overachievers in that department. We had them pruned, cabled, pruned again. And again. They were so late in dropping their leaves that Thanksgiving turned into a raking party.
But then I reminisce—in spring they were a halo of white blossoms, beckoning bees, and Baltimore orioles.