Thursday, March 16, 2017

Misty Wood Enlightens Me About Diabolically Fishy Bradford Pears

A few days ago I blogged about the trees you see here in a Snowflake Blizzard With Real Desperate Housewives Of Wichita Falls.

In that blogging I wondered what type tree I was seeing which had blown a blizzard of white petal flakes on me.

Then the renowned, appropriately named Texoma horticulturist, Miss D. Wood, also known as Misty Wood, informed me that the type tree which was creating the whiteout of blizzarding flower flakes was known  as a Bradford Pear.

Misty Wood pointed me to an article about the Bradford Pear trees which informed me that It’s official: Bradford Pears are the worst trees, which then led me to KFOR TV's online article in which Oklahoma forestry experts warn against Bradford Pears.

A blurb from the KFOR article...

OKLAHOMA CITY – The Bradford Pear tree looks beautiful but smells terrible, and its scent isn’t the only reason people are cursing the greenery.

“It was deemed the perfect tree. I mean, it’s beautiful in the spring, because it has the flowers and it’s contained. It can grow about anywhere in Oklahoma, and then in the fall it has really great colors,” said Mark Bays, urban forestry coordinator for OK Forestry Services.

They’re also on a watch list for invasive plants in Oklahoma.That’s because, in the last 10 years, the Department of Agriculture started seeing problems with it spreading past its boundaries. “If you have all of these Bradford Pears growing in close proximity to where other native trees are, they start taking from those resources that those native trees need – water in the soil, nutrients in the soil and then they can start crowding out the other trees that naturally should be there,” Bays said.
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Among the many complaints about the Bradford Pear one was that it smelled like rotten fish. On my first visit I had not made note of anything fishy. Today when I walked among the Bradford Pears they were no longer sporting any white blooms. And there was nothing fishy about them...

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