In September 2024, Massachusetts added Callery pears—commonly known as Bradford pears (Pyrus calleryana)—to its Prohibited Plant List, formally reclassifying a once-celebrated ornamental tree as an invasive species.[1] The Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources determined that Callery pears spread aggressively beyond their intended borders and dominate surrounding landscapes, crowding out native plants that local wildlife depend on for food and shelter.[2] Under the new regulations, growers may sell existing trees only until December 31, 2028, while the importation and cultivation of new stock is banned immediately. The rules account for the tree’s continued use as grafting rootstock in pear production. Growers are required to carefully monitor any failed grafts and remove root systems when the grafts fail—further cementing the state’s determination to eliminate the plant species from the Massachusetts landscape. These policies do more than manage plants: they draw new lines around belonging, determining which species may remain rooted and which must be systematically removed.
The pear tree in the backyard of my childhood home grew in the dead center of the lawn. At one end of the lawn sat my dad’s Toyota—perpetually outside, him never once wanting to protect it in the garage. Our street ran up a hill so steep that almost no one bothered to walk up or down, yet drivers tore up the hill fast enough that the city eventually installed speed bumps. The pear tree’s placement—between the empty shelter of a discarded garage and a makeshift raceway—made it a quiet center, equidistant between safety and danger. During the summers, I played with children who lived next door—two sisters—and with another child from one house over. There were three of us girls and one boy, who, in getting to the pear tree first from the driveway, constantly beat us in tag.
Roaring school buses signaled summer’s defiant exit, even if they only came for me. My home friends rode the train to their private schools near Fenway Park and Cambridge. I was enrolled in the longstanding Massachusetts program that busses students of color into predominantly white suburbs, a byproduct of a civil rights crisis turned Boston legacy. We each rolled away from the pear trees of Dorchester, in our disparate directions, for most months of the year. Over an hour each way; the thinning tree canopy signaling where we were along the route – the closer to school, the more tree cover, the closer to home, the less. However, seeing a pear tree as I peeked my eyes open from a bus nap meant I was closer to the city; I was almost home. Back then our pear tree had a fantastical canopy that draped over me as I sat with my back against its trunk after school—quieting noises and neatly dropping its fruiting wealth in my hungry hands. Year after year, the tree limbs seemed to dangle its fruit closer to the ground—the pears weren’t any heavier—but I’d snap one off and the branch would not eagerly bounce back up. I thought the tree catering, instead of weakening.
Boston, and Dorchester specifically, has a unique history relating to pears. According to pomologist and fruit historian Joan Morgan, the founding of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in 1829 spurred America’s “pear fever,” centered in Boston.[3] Marshall P. Wilder, a Boston businessman and president of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society from 1841 to 1848, collected and grew some 1,200 varieties of pears at his Hawthorne Grove estate in Dorchester. Wilder would later help establish the University of Massachusetts Amherst and become one of the founders of the American Pomological Society, which as Morgan notes, “took the work of the Boston fruit experts across America,” from Massachusetts to greater New England, New York and Pennsylvania across to the Pacific coast. That history is preserved in Dorchester—widely recognized as Boston’s largest and most diverse neighborhood—where backyards and streetscapes were once adorned with pear trees, long before they were classified as invasive.
Eventually, the school bus stopped coming. All of my home friends moved away; maybe we became too comfortable with being far from home. I moved to New York after graduate school and found that being away from my parents made noticing changes easier, if harder to admit. My mom’s hair had gone gray, almost white. My dad became more particular about the house—its appearance (needing a complete paint job), its requirements (individual shingles needing immediate replacement), and its sale value (hinging on whether the front hedges were mulched or not). Often, he’d signal our phone conversation had come to an end by complaining about the neighbors’ lawn care routine, or lack thereof. The pears barely come in, he said once. The branches snap off, I think I heard. Maybe he said them more than once. I returned home one day, looking out of the same windows my parents must have while we played rigged games of tag, to see only a barren spot of lawn. The stump, the roots, all removed. The pear tree died. Its death was the culmination of a protracted illness. At least, that is what my dad told me.
I nodded along, waiting for an explanation; something more. A tinge of guilt washed over me; perhaps if I moved back home, raised my children in that same yard, letting them play around the tree, there would be a different outcome. I would take over from my father as the tree’s caretaker and pass that role to my daughter in turn. The pear tree became a stand-in for a larger feeling of regret; in moving away from my aging parents, I neglected the tree that served as my other anchor for home. Its removal felt, in one sense, like a punishment for having left. Regulators later articulated what my father already knew: declining yield and brittle limbs were not isolated failures, but symptoms of a larger ecological unraveling. Henry Thoreau seemingly knew it, too. Thoreau famously cast pears as inferior to what he deemed resilient and abundant apples, calling pears “less poetic than apples” having neither the beauty nor the fragrance of apples.[4] While children dream of apples, Thoreau wrote, aristocrats are the connoisseurs of pears and “they are named after emperors and kings and queens and dukes and duchesses.”[5] The removal of the tree, its snapped branches swept up and away, made the feeling of broken lineage real.
Without the pear tree, I had a reason to reflect on the subjectivity of change—how I have welcomed evolution when it carried me forward and despised it when it reminded me of having gone too far—my inability to ignore time into stasis. That personal reckoning reflects a broader truth. Nature, experienced as both personal and political, is evolving. The politics of nature recognizes that there is as much risk in change as there is safety; plant life and personhood must coexist. Ecological regulation is both an act of removal and remembrance—a balancing of grief and gratitude—for what was once rooted in place.
[1] “Massachusetts Prohibited Plant List – Updates,“ Commonwealth of Massachusetts, accessed December 1, 2025.
[2] Rin Velasco and Veer Mudambi, “Are Bradford Pear Trees Banned in Massachusetts? Why They Stink, Literally,” Telegram & Gazette, April 29, 2025.
[3] Joan Morgan, The Book of Pears: The Definitive History and Guide to Over 500 Varieties (Ebury Press, 2015).
[4] Henry David Thoreau, Journal, July 23, 1860, digitized manuscript, Digital Thoreau, accessed February 5, 2026, https://dld-thoreau-assets.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/writings_journals_pdfs/J16f4-f6.pdf.
[5] Thoreau, Journal, October 11, 1860.
*Cover image: A vintage photograph of the old “Endicott Pear Tree,“ Danvers, Mass., planted by Governor Endicott in 1628. Photograph by J.S.Lefavour, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, via Wikimedia Commons.
[Cover image description: a sepia-toned photograph of a pear tree surrounded by a wooden fence. To the side of the photograph are the words, “A New England View.”]
Edited by Samia Cohen; reviewed by Katherine Cheung.
