This pear tree remembers a poet's birthplace that no longer exists.
Photo: Dave Richardson (CC BY)
European Pear
Pyrus communis
Nobody planted these to be looked at. We map 9 of them, in 8 cities.
A pear is an orchard tree, grown for fruit and grubbed out when it stops paying, so an old one is something somebody chose not to replace. The oldest is in The Hague, planted in 1638 in the courtyard of an almshouse for women of unblemished character, and the residents have been turning its hard little juttepeers into jelly for close to four centuries. Helsinki's is the last survivor of a manor orchard and is reckoned the tallest and oldest pear in Finland. Two have won national votes. Slovakia's pink-fleshed pear at Bošáca, about 200 years old, took the country's Tree of the Year in 2015, and the Czech Republic elected a lone pear in a field near Mrákotín in 2023, the one a folk song says stands in the open field.
Prague
Boston
The oldest living cultivated fruit tree in North America grows beside a hospital car park in Danvers, about 25 kilometres north of Boston.
Warsaw
A pear tree is a strange choice for a memorial, which is exactly why this one has stayed interesting long after the man it supposedly honours.
Warsaw protects a pear tree that grows out of a pavement.
Photo: Panek (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Helsinki
The last fruit tree standing in a manor garden that once grew many is also, by several accounts, the oldest and tallest pear tree in Finland.
Utrecht
An orchard would have cut this one down eighty years ago.
Salzburg
Charlemagne, the legend says, sleeps inside the Untersberg, and when he wakes he will ride out to a pear tree on this field and fight the last battle between good and evil.
Bošáca
Slovakia's national tree contest has been won only once by a pear, and this pink-fleshed local variety is it.
Photo: Alena Hroncová (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Mrákotín
Most Czechs can sing about this tree before they ever see it.
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