The Old Pear of the Geertebolwerk

An orchard would have cut this one down eighty years ago. Commercial pears are grubbed out when they stop paying, usually somewhere in their fifth decade. This one is roughly 116 to 126 years old by the register's planting band of 1900 to 1910, still flowers white every spring and still sets fruit, which is a career almost no pear tree is allowed to have. It is a small tree and the numbers say so plainly: 11 metres tall, 182 centimetres around the trunk, measured by the canal-side survey of Utrecht's monumental trees, which also puts a species to it, the common pear, Pyrus communis. Against the planes and beeches of the singel it is easy to walk straight past. It is also, in a ring of parks planted entirely for ornament, one of very few trees here that produces something a person could eat. Whether the fruit is worth eating is a different question and nobody has written that down. You will find it at the Geertebolwerk, at the water's edge level with Zilverstraat, on one of the bastions of the medieval wall that became public park ground in the nineteenth century. The survey that measured it calls it small, old and vital, which is a fair summary of why it is on this list at all: age here is not about size.