How to grow pears

A pear does not ripen properly on the tree. Left hanging, it continues to soften from the core outwards, so the flesh around the pips turns brown and mealy while the outside still looks and feels like a good pear. Old growers called it sleepy. You find out when you cut one open.

So a pear is picked while still firm and finished indoors. The test is simple and worth learning: lift the fruit to horizontal with your palm. If it separates from the spur with a slight twist, it is ready to pick. If it clings, leave it a few more days.

Then ripen at room temperature and check daily by pressing gently at the neck, next to the stalk — that softens first, and it is the only part worth testing. A pear tested at the fat end is a pear you have already bruised.

Late varieties want cold storage first: a few weeks somewhere cool and dark before being brought into the warm to finish. That is how a pear picked in October is eaten in December.

Bartrum makes a useful point in the other direction. Dessert pears, he writes, often cook well if gathered before they are ripe — so a tree picked slightly too early is not a loss, it is stewed pears. There is no equivalent rescue for one picked too late.

This is the second real difference, and Bartrum states it plainly in 1902: the pear blooms early, some time before the apple. It needs more warmth, and more protection. To plant pears in a north aspect even on a wall is a mistake.

Earlier blossom means more exposure to late frost, and pear blossom is killed at around 28°F — a temperature that arrives after the apples are safely still in bud. In a maritime spring that is a real and recurring loss.

This is where your own frost dates do actual work. The gap between the date frost usually finishes and the date it is safely finished is the window that decides a pear crop, and it differs by weeks between two towns in the same county.

The practical answers are all about siting. Give a pear the warmest wall you have, ideally facing the sun. Avoid frost pockets — low ground where cold air collects on a still night. And where a tree is small enough, fleece over the blossom on a clear still night is worth the trouble in a way it rarely is for apples.

It is also why pears reward wall training more than apples do. A fan or espalier against a warm wall gets radiated heat at night, ripens its wood better, and flowers into shelter rather than into open air.

As with apples, the rootstock decides the size of the tree, and the story is simpler because there are essentially two families.

Quince rootstocks — Quince A and the more dwarfing Quince C — give a tree eight to eighteen feet that crops in three to five years. This is what almost every garden pear is on, and what you want.

Pear seedling stock makes an enormous, long-lived, slow-to-crop tree. The pear orchards that survive from a century ago are on it, and it is the wrong choice for a garden unless you are planting for grandchildren.

There is one complication with no equivalent in apples. Some pear varieties are graft-incompatible with quince — they simply fail to unite, or unite and then break at the join years later. Williams' Bon Chrétien is the classic example. Nurseries solve this with an interstem: a compatible variety grafted between the quince and the one you wanted, so the tree carries two graft unions.

That is worth knowing at the point of sale, because a tree with an interstem is not a defect — it is the reason the variety is available at all.

Bartrum records the scale this once operated at: sixty-four varieties known in one early list, a hundred and thirty-eight seventy years later, six hundred and thirty by 1829 — and one nineteenth-century grower claiming over a thousand sorts worked on quince stock.

Pears need a pollination partner exactly as apples do — a different variety flowering at the same time, matched by pollination group. A single pear in an isolated garden crops poorly or not at all, and a few varieties are triploid and give nothing back.

Pruning is apple pruning. Winter for structure and vigour, summer for restraint on trained forms, and the same single rule underneath: light and air must reach the fruiting wood. Pears spur very freely, so thinning congested spur systems on an older tree matters more than it does on an apple.

Thin the fruit in June to one or two per cluster. Pears are less prone to biennial bearing than apples but not immune, and crowded fruit stays small.

The disease to know is pear rust, increasingly common where junipers grow nearby — bright orange spots on the upper leaf surface, with growths beneath. It needs both hosts to complete its cycle, so the honest answer is that removing your own junipers helps and a neighbour's are beyond your control.

Otherwise pears are, if anything, less trouble than apples: scab affects them but usually less severely, and codling moth prefers apples given the choice.

The Book of Pears and Plums has been on our shelf since we built it and this is the first guide to read it properly. It is number XI in the Handbooks of Practical Gardening, and its preface is signed from Wakes Colne Rectory, Essex, in July 1902 — internal evidence for a book whose title page carries no year, which is why our shelf lists it as undated.

It is English, so the varieties do not transfer and should be checked against regional advice before you buy anything. What does transfer is the method, and on that it is the clearest short treatment of pears we have found: chapters on stocks, pyramids, columnar trees, espaliers, horizontals on walls, fans, bushes, cordons and arches, which is a far wider range of trained forms than a modern book will offer.

The reason those forms fill a whole book is the reason above: an English pear needs warmth it does not reliably get, so growers learnt a dozen ways to put a tree against a wall. A Pacific Northwest garden has the same problem and can borrow the same answers.

Read it for training and siting. Ignore its variety lists, and — as with any book of this age — ignore its spray recommendations entirely.