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Planting
Days to maturity
Seasonal yields
Sow indoors · Direct sow · Transplant outdoors
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Plant · P-374
Callery Pear
Pyrus calleryana
Callery pear is famous as tough rootstock, not as fruit: its own small, hard pomes only turn edible once frost softens and sweetens them, more a wild nibble and bird crop than an orchard fruit. It is nearly indestructible - tolerating sand, clay, wet ground, drought once established and even air pollution - which is exactly the trait that let it escape cultivation and naturalize across old fields, roadsides and creek margins. It spreads readily from bird-carried seed and by resprouting from cut or damaged wood, forming thickets that shade out whatever grew beneath them, and its weak branch crotches tend to split under wind and ice after about fifteen years, which is why it works better as a coppiced hedge or windbreak than as a specimen tree.
Record at a glance
Growing profile
- Sun
- Full Sun · Partial Sun
- USDA zone
- USDA 5–9
- Soil
- Sand · Loam · Clay
- Moisture
- Dry · Well-Drained · Moderate · Moist
Vertical layer
Canopy- Soil pH
- 5–7.5
- Plant type
- Deciduous Tree
- Mature height
- 30–50 ft
- Mature spread
- 20–35 ft
- Plant spacing
- 24–60 ft
- Root type
- Fibrous-shallow
- Spread pattern
- Both
Keep exploring
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American Chestnut
Castanea dentata
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Ulmus americana
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The deeper layer
Plan what comes next.
- Primary
- Locked ecological function
- Secondary
- Locked ecological function
- Byproduct
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Behind the record
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