The Elaeagnus-Leaved Pear

Pyrus elaeagrifolia, the Elaeagnus-Leaved Pear, only reached Britain around 1844, imported from the eastern Mediterranean and Anatolia as a garden curiosity rather than a fruit tree, and York Museum Gardens planted one of the country's earliest examples not long after. It grows at a visibly unusual angle, leaning rather than standing straight, and its narrow, silvery-grey leaves look more like an olive's than a pear's, the resemblance the species name refers to. The Tree Register has measured its girth at over two metres and named it a Yorkshire county champion, the largest recorded example of the species in the county, one of six such champions inside these ten acres beside the ruins of St Mary's Abbey. Its lean has become pronounced enough that York Museums Trust has already taken cuttings, a quiet insurance policy against the day this specific tree eventually comes down, propagating its replacement before the original is gone rather than after. For now it is very much alive and still leaning, one of the garden's 80 to 150 year old champions, an unfamiliar Mediterranean pear still settled at whatever angle its roots have chosen.