Wikipedia’s article on Pyrus calleryana will explain to you why you should not call the wild trees “Bradford Pear,” and you may choose to be pedantically correct if you like. “Bradford” was a popular cultivar of Callery Pear widely planted in the United States as an ornamental tree; the trees that have spring up on their own in our forests over the past thirty years or so have mixed cultivars in their ancestry. However, “Bradford Pear” has become the common name of the species, whatever the botanists say, and we must use it to be understood. “Melius est reprehendant nos grammatici quam non intelligant populi,” as St. Augustine said: better the grammarians should chide us than the people not understand us.
It was not common to see these trees in the wild thirty years ago, but now they light up the woods all over Pittsburgh and its suburbs in the early spring. They have become such a common escape that Pennsylvania recently banned the sale of Pyrus calleryana on the grounds that it is a noxious weed. But the trees are beautiful, and they are nowhere near as noxious as the Japanese monster knotweeds, so we should not feel guilty about enjoying them when they are one of the first trees to bloom in the spring. This tree was growing in Bird Park, Mount Lebanon.
