THE ORIGIN OF THE PEAR

The origin of the pear is a fascinating subject, which all begins with its wild species. The best of the wild trees growing in the woodlands of mountain slopes were selected by the earliest farmers and brought into cultivation. Many more generations of seedlings and selections eventually gave rise to named cultivated varieties, correctly called cultivars, though more generally simply varieties. The Ancient Greeks grew several named varieties of pear, and the Romans knew of many more. And it is varieties that give us the diversity we love in a fruit. Good seedlings could arise wherever wild pear species grew, and a tree bearing a particularly fine fruit could then be replicated and distributed further afield through the technique of grafting. This is necessary because pears, like apples, do not come true from seed and will not readily root from cuttings. Every pear pip produces a seedling that is different from its parents and thus potentially a new variety, but which will need grafting to reproduce it. Grafting involves taking a scion (cutting) from the chosen tree and binding it into a cleft made on another young tree: the scion will grow into the chosen tree, the sapling forming its roots or rootstock.

Grafting is an ancient craft, first recorded in the West in early 400 BC and of great significance in the cultivation of tree fruits, such as the pear and apple, since grafting delivered considerable practical advantages as compared with other ways of propagation. It speeded up the process. Scions grafted onto a sapling will give many more new, young trees than might be grown from the suckers (which form around the base of a mature pear tree, growing on its own roots), or through bending down, layering and rooting low-growing branches. The easiest way to raise lots of new trees is from seed, but seedling pears take 15 and more years to fruit, while grafted trees can crop sooner. They also propagate the original tree, rather than providing new varieties, which may or may not be of value.

Grafting also brings flexibility. The scion cut in the winter when growth is dormant, if wrapped in moss or simply stuck in something moist, such as a lump of clay, will remain viable for weeks if not months. Thus scions of varieties can be transported hundreds of miles and introduced to other areas, even another country. In this way varieties can be distributed, exchanged and collections formed. In theory, a variety could be perpetuated forever with little change in its make-up. Fruit trees are also propagated in early summer by ‘budding’, a technique known to Roman authors. This involves a bud and its surroundings being carefully sliced from a shoot of the variety and fitted, rather like a patch, onto the stem of the rootstock, from which a similar-shaped piece of bark has been removed.

The generally accepted view is that our European or Western pear arose from the wild species Pyrus communis, native across Continental Europe to north-west Iran, and that this species is a hybrid of Pyrus pyraster, indigenous to Europe (possibly to Britain), and Pyrus caucasica found further east, or that these are subspecies, and the term Pyrus communis is used to cover them all.3 The pear’s origins are probably not as clear-cut as this suggests and it may be a more complex hybrid, involving additional species that have contributed to its development over thousands of years of cultivation, or at least created local populations of valued pears, which in time may have intermingled and in the long run added to the development of the domestic pear. In total there are 20–24 widely recognised major species of Pyrus distributed across the northern hemisphere from Europe to China and around the Mediterranean. Around half of these are native to Europe and the Near East, along with ones found in the Atlas Mountains of North Africa. The rest are native to Central Asia and China, including among the latter the forerunners of the Asian pear.

Wild pears were gathered and used millennia ago and their carbonised remains have been found in neolithic and Bronze Age sites across Europe and the Middle East, including northern Italy, Switzerland, the former Yugoslavia, Germany, Greece, Ukraine, Turkey and Syria.4 The earliest written records that we have of the pear relate to pear trees planted in tended plots in ancient Assyria during the second millennium BC, but we cannot know what species these were. When we get to an account of massed plantings of pear trees in ancient Persia around 500 BC we can be more confident that they were of Pyrus communis, since the Persian Empire embraced the territory of this species in the mountains of north-west Iran. In my own investigations into the beginning of the pear’s story, I thought it could be productive to look in the Middle East and spent some time in Iran and Syria. In these areas pears have been cultivated for thousands of years, and it seemed possible that there might still be signs of its transition from the wild into cultivation. During my visits to Iran in 2004, I was able to see the close connections that exist between some communities and the wild trees, and sample local pears through the generous hospitality and guidance of the horticulturists at the Seed & Plant Improvement Research Institute, Karaj, near Tehran, and their colleagues at other institutes.

Iranian botanists regard the pear as one of the country’s most diverse native fruits and believe that vestiges of the first steps in its domestication are still evident in the province of Gilan, which lies in the north-west, between the Caspian Sea and the Alborz Mountains. On the slopes of the Alborz, wild Pyrus communis and a number of other Pyrus species have been recorded and can still be found growing among the forest trees. Villagers used to harvest pears from these trees, and only a generation ago selected trees from the forests to plant on farms. Gilan may well be an area in which the movement of pears from the wild into cultivation has been going on almost forever – a process replicated everywhere that trees of wild Pyrus communis or its forerunners grew. The famous Russian geneticist Nikolai Vavilov suggested Transcaucasia, to the north-west of Gilan, as one such area. In the early 1900s, he found the mountain forests of Transcaucasia resembled the ‘Garden of Paradise’ where ‘vines are often twined around wild pears and quinces’, while as farmers cleared woodland to open up land for growing cereals, they spared the highest-valued pear and apple trees, leaving them growing in the fields.5 Much the same might have been said of Gilan, which is another fruit paradise, blessed with an abundance of wild fruits and a congenial climate. Water is plentiful, unlike in most of Iran. Clouds gather over the Caspian, bringing rain almost every month to the narrow strip of fertile land at its southern edge and to the verdant, wooded north-facing slopes of the Alborz, creating conditions conducive to the growth of seedlings and their transplantation. Summers are hot, but winters sufficiently cold to break the dormancy of the seeds and ensure seed germination. Cold winter weather is also necessary for the reliable fruiting of mature pear trees since pears – like apples and other temperate fruits – need a period of chilling to break the dormancy of the fruit buds.

An extraordinarily wide range of fruits prospers in Gilan. Pears and walnuts are cultivated alongside mulberries for the silkworms. Tea bushes, now an important commercial crop, green the valleys and slopes all around, reaching up almost to the forests and mist-shrouded mountains around the town of Lahijan. In less tended corners you find wild figs and wild grapes climbing up trees. But the pear is the fruit you see growing everywhere and that is most strongly associated with everyday life. It is given a special name in local languages. In Gilan this is khodj, referring to the trees growing in and around villages and the countryside. Further north into Azerbaijan and up into Transcaucasia it changes to armut or armud/amrud. This is a word often used as a compliment, and shows the great affection held for the pear in Iran: the revered thirteenth-century poet Saadi employed it to convey the sweetness and beauty of springtime, and the pendulous crystallised sugar drops used to sweeten tea are said to be amrud.6

My hosts took me into the countryside to see khodj trees in villages to the west of Rhast, the region’s capital city. Driving past stalls selling fish from the Caspian and the sought-after Gilan rice, we passed holiday-makers returning to Tehran from their seaside homes, and turned off the main road into Safidrood, the White River Valley. Away from the paddy fields and past a little mill threshing rice, we climbed up the slope to a farm. Behind the typical Caspian house, with its overhanging roof sheltering a wide veranda and stores of garlic for treating the common ailment of rheumatic joints (brought on by the damp weather), there was an orchard of venerable khodj trees, together with quince and medlar. The farmer climbed one tree to pick some pears and knocked others down with a long stick. These were just about ripe – juicy and quite sweet. Another farm had a large pear tree nearby; further along the road another tree, known to be a hundred years old, grew close to a house, the last of a former orchard of khodj trees. At several places we found pears sufficiently good to find a market in Rasht. We were discovering pear trees at every stop, yet found we had travelled hardly 5 miles. Close to homes, in pasture land, on headlands – in any patch of available ground – there were pear trees. Most of these, they said, had been taken from the forests. Some became well known for the quality of their pears and were propagated, named and distributed around the villages. So we saw, for example, Ab Khodj (Juicy Khodj) in several places. A collection of khodj pears has been made at Lahijan, and in these pears you can see all the main features of the domestic pear. In support of their role in the development of Iranian pears, recent molecular studies have shown a strong link between khodj and present mainstream Iranian varieties.7

North-west Iran is rich in these local pears. Qazvin, for instance, about 100 miles south of Rasht on the other side of the Alborz and well known for its grapes, has at least a dozen sorts of pear that appear in markets. Another dozen and more have been found on sale in small towns in Iranian Kurdistan, and in a good season some find their way to markets in the capital. Like the khodj pears of Gilan, the local pears of Kurdistan show a range of qualities, some better eating than others. In search of these local pears and also wild pears, we drove across country to Sanandaj, the capital of Kurdistan. Botanists at its horticultural centre are making a special study of local pears, collecting and documenting them. They are also identifying pockets of wild species, and took us into the mountains to find these near Baneh, the border town with northern Iraq, close to Saqqez, some hours’ drive to the north of Sanandaj. As we climbed and wound around the hillsides, farmland gave way to treed slopes of deciduous oak, where wild almond and pistachio are found along with wild species of plum, cherry and pear.

From Baneh the road was a dirt track. Passing a gigantic pile of grapes waiting to be ferried off by the lorry load, we travelled along a smugglers’ route, negotiating a convoy of mules bringing cheap cigarettes across the border, finally to arrive at a spot where some people had settled down to drink tea: they might have been smugglers or herdsmen, I could not tell. But close by was a group of wild pear trees in fruit. The pears were small and just edible. Similar clusters of pear trees, they told me, grow along the northern Zagros, with the greatest numbers to the north into Azerbaijan, where the rainfall is higher. All are believed to be trees of wild Pyrus communis.

Most wild pears, whether of Pyrus communis or other species, were very sharp to eat, but drying them softened the harsh astringency, and as dried fruits, quantities might be stored and traded. When exploring the fruit forests of the Caucasus, Vavilov found that pears were sliced in half and laid out in the sun to dry, and also – like other dried fruits – ground up into a type of meal, which was mixed with barley flour, probably to ‘extend’ the flour during hard times over a severe winter.8 Pears could also be bletted to reduce the sharpness. Bletting is a process associated with very astringent fruits such as the medlar, which if kept in a cool place or simply left on the tree, soften and sweeten to become edible. Drying and bletting were ways of using wild fruits of a number of species, in addition to Pyrus communis, and these probably included Pyrus amygdaliformis (the almond leaved pear), native in eastern Mediterranean countries – Greece, the Balkans, Turkey – and Pyrus elaeagrifolia (the olive-leaved pear) of south-eastern Europe, Turkey, Caucasus and north-west Iran. The willow leaved pear Pyrus salicifolia, distributed across the Caucasus to the northern Zagros Mountains, bears small, very astringent fruit and is familiar to us now as an ornamental garden tree. Fruits of its close relative, Pyrus glabra of the southern Zagros, are gathered in Iranian Kurdistan to this day, although it is not the small, yellow, very sour, tannic pears that are eaten, but only their seeds. The fruit is called andjudjek, a derogatory term for small and unpleasant, and the name also given to its large seeds, almost twice the size of most pear pips. Wild pears collected by villagers are brought to the city stall-holders, who crush the fruits and extract the seeds, which are dried, to be sold like pumpkin and sunflower seeds; I found them on sale in Sanandaz and they are sold widely.

A pear tree growing wild among the ruins of Notion, an ancient Greek city on the west coast of Turkey, situated on a hill above the Gulf of Kusadasi.

Some of these other species may have played a part in the evolution of the domestic pear, or at least given rise to local populations of pears. One way in which this could have been encouraged is through the common practice of using young, wild trees as rootstocks for propagating new trees. Wild Pyrus syriaca, for instance, is still employed to an extent in Syria, where farmers will pull out suckers from the base of trees to use as rootstocks, and similarly fruit-growers elsewhere would have used whatever was available, such as Pyrus elaeagrifolia in Turkey. In Anatolia (eastern Turkey), it was usual to graft wild trees in situ with an established variety, a practice that was probably widely employed. Only some of the main branches of the wild tree were grafted and the others left as they were. Thus, when the grafts flowered, there was the almost inevitable probability of cross-pollination between the grafted variety and the wild tree.9 This was seemingly even promoted during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries through the complexities of Ottoman law, which applied in Turkey, Syria and other parts of the Ottoman Empire. Ownership of the fruit tree and the soil in which it grew were separate legal entities according to the letter of the law, although the law was not always followed. It was a widely held belief that through planting orchards and cultivating fruit trees, the farmer could gain freehold possession of that land. Frequently, this was also the legal conclusion. The practice extended to wild fruit trees, if they were grafted with scions of a valued variety, thus increasing a farmer’s land-holding and in effect legitimised an age-old custom.10 Seedlings from these fruits, if useful, could therefore add to the diversity of a region’s pears.

In the southern Zagros Mountains, across Iraq and southern Turkey into Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, the main indigenous species is the Syrian pear, Pyrus syriaca, which it seems was brought into cultivation. It is also of current interest because of its tolerance to drought. At the time of my visits during the period 2000–05, horticulturists at the University of Damascus were investigating its use as a rootstock for modern orchards. As part of these studies, a number of wild trees had been identified and material collected from them in different areas. Through the splendid hospitality of members of the university’s horticulture department, I was lucky enough to join the research team on a trip to Suweida in the south and find wild pear trees. On another expedition we found wild trees of Pyrus syriaca in the foothills of the Anti-Lebanon Mountains, not far from Damascus. They also grow in the Alawi Mountains near Latakia in the north-west. Fruits of the Syrian pear are small, dark green, hard and astringent, packed with large gritty stone cells. In my experience they are inedible, but others say that they can be more palatable and are still used around Latakia.

As late as the nineteenth century, according to the French consul of the day, Pyrus syriaca remained ‘extremely widespread in all the plains’ of Syria and selected ‘improved’ seedlings were grown in villages. The fruits, though acidic, were of a reasonable size, he reported, and unlike ‘the true wild pear, which scarcely exceeds the size of a walnut and has unbearable tartness’. In support of his claim that these trees were selections from the wild, he pointed out that any European varieties of pears introduced to the Levant stood out as distinct from the local pear, which ‘although the quality is very inferior to ours, is nonetheless highly valued by the Arabs’.11 When I visited Syria, a pear called ‘Mirab’ was still collected from trees near Maaloula, close to Damascus. It may be a seedling of Pyrus syriaca, although it could be a hybrid with Pyrus communis, and similarly crosses between these two species may have contributed to the Western pear’s evolution.

The European Pyrus nivalis is another species that was used and probably involved in our domestic pear’s development. Its austere fruit did not mellow until the snow was on the ground, so it was called Schneebirne, or Snow Pear, by farmers along the Danube; hence also its Latin name. Snow pears kept until December and ‘escaped decay; are sweet without any bitterness, of a delightful flavour and are eaten by the farmers’, found the Austrian botanist Joseph Jacquin, who first described the species in 1774. Wild trees of Pyrus nivalis, although rare, were reported recently in Slovenia, where they are known as mostnica and have long been used for making most (fermented juice) – that is, perry, which was distilled into pear spirit. In former Czechoslovakia the name was ‘Snow White Pear’ because of their large, shiny white flowers.12 Pyrus nivalis is believed to be the ancestor of the sauger or sage pears of France, used for making perry and so called because their grey, hairy leaves, like those of Pyrus nivalis, resembled the herb sage. French botanist Joseph Decaisne discovered cultivated trees under the name of ‘Sauger Cirole’ in Berry, Maine, Burgundy, Champagne and Gâtinais in the 1850s and found them good enough to eat when bletted – ‘almost black on the outside and the colour of a ripe medlar fruit within’.13 It seems probable that most sauger pears were hybrids with Pyrus communis and that Pyrus nivalis made further contributions to the domestic pear. The greyish-white, downy foliage that you see in Pyrus nivalis and the ‘Cirole’/de Sirole pear (conserved in the UK National Fruit Collection) is most obvious in the spring. This characteristic is evident in a number of ancient varieties, which also have bold, large flowers. They possibly share an ancestry with Pyrus nivalis, but not all old pear varieties or all perry pears have these features.14

THE ASIAN PEAR

If we  turn now to look at the wider story of the pear across the northern hemisphere, then we discern two distinct types: the European or Western pear and the Asian pear, which each seemingly developed separately, from different species. In the West, we are much less familiar with the Asian pear, although hundreds of varieties are known in China, Japan and Korea. The obvious difference between the two lies in the texture of the flesh: Western pears become melting on keeping, while Asian pears remain crisp. Asian pears also have a different appearance, at least as judged from those varieties usually seen in the West. In shape and skin colouring, they resemble a lightly russetted apple and, with crisp texture, are often mistakenly sold as an ‘apple-pear’. Trees of an Asian pear also show differences from a Western pear, with bolder, long-stemmed flowers and bronzed young foliage, so in the spring they stand out in a collection of fruit varieties. Asian pears, however, did not find a niche in gardens or orchards outside their homeland until comparatively recently, largely because the fruit was considered scarcely edible. Even hybrids of Asian and Western pears made in the USA caused the English fruit authority Edward Bunyard, writing in the 1920s, ‘to express the fervent hope that no one will attempt to introduce these execrable fruit into general culture here and so bring disgrace upon the name of the delicious and melting Pear’.15

These days, Asian pear trees are available from nurseries, imported fruit is on sale in specialist Chinese and Japanese stores and sometimes supermarkets, and we may see more in the future. China produces the largest quantity of pears, chiefly Asian, in the world and, with broadening trading horizons, there is already concern in Iran, for example, that their traditional fruit, the Western pear, may be overwhelmed by Chinese imports or influences. Apart from being grown in the Far East, Asian pears are a small-scale commercial crop in New Zealand and Australia, produced for local sales in California, mainly by its Chinese community – similarly in Chile for Japanese residents. They lie outside the scope of this book, but for the sake of completeness and because Asian pears may not be entirely divorced from the Western pear’s history, we should briefly look at the pears of China.

Cultivation of pears had begun by 1000 BC in the Yangtze Valley. Different varieties were known at the time of the Han Dynasty (206 BC – AD 220), when it was claimed, ’In the north of Huai River, those who grow 1,000 pear trees are as rich as those barons who possess 1,000 families of tenant farmers.’ The ancestors of these pears and the four main groups of Asian pears lie with China’s indigenous species.16 The so-called Chinese White Pear (Bai Li), said to be the most loved by Chinese people, derives from the species Pyrus x bretschneideri, native to northern China and itself a hybrid of Pyrus pyrifolia and other species. As the English name suggests, the pears are pale cream, almost white-skinned, with crisp, juicy, quite perfumed flesh, although a range of qualities and forms exist; the variety Ya Li (Duck’s Bill) is sometimes seen on sale in the UK. The Chinese Sand Pear (Sha Li), Pyrus pyrifolia, grows wild further south in the Yangtze Valley and is also found in Japan, although whether native or introduced from China is uncertain; the name comes from the ‘grit’ or stone cells once found in the flesh around the core, but long bred out in modern varieties. It gave rise to the type of Asian pear most often seen in the West – usually rounded in shape with crisp, juicy, sweet, scented flesh. In Japan they are known as nashi, extensively developed there over the last century, and they are also grown in Korea. A third group of Chinese pears arose from the very hardy Ussurian pear (Qui Zi Li), Pyrus ussuriensis, native to the Ussuri Valley of Manchuria and found all over northern China and in Korea. The species and its varieties are the hardiest of all pears, making exceptionally long-lived and productive trees able to survive extremely low temperatures. Lastly, there is the aptly named Fragrant Pear (Xiang Li), the species Pyrus x sinkiangensis of Xianjiang, north-west China, which is a natural hybrid of Western Pyrus communis and Chinese White Pear (Pyrus x bretschneideri).

The first records of fruit cultivation in Xianjiang date from the fifth century AD, a time when it appears that hybridisation between Western and Asian pears had already occurred, as dried fruits unearthed from tumuli dated to this period resembled a semi-cultivated pear of southern Xianjiang known today.17 Old local varieties vary in appearance and quality, some resembling Western pears and others closer to the Chinese White Pear. Today’s leading variety, Korla Xiangli, meaning Korla’s Fragrant Pear, is oval with pale greenish-yellow skin and very scented, sweet, juicy, crisp flesh, and much publicised recently following its importation into the US and UK from plantations around the city of Korla, the centre of Xianjiang’s fruit-growing region.

The Fragrant Pear raises the intriguing question as to whether there has been further hybridisation between Western and Asian pears – and the possibility that our European pears have a more complex ancestry than hitherto imagined. In many ways hybridisation must have been inevitable in Xianjiang, given its location on the principal route of the ancient Silk Road carrying trade between China and the Mediterranean. Crop plants had begun to move from the West into China long before the growers of Xianjiang were at work cultivating their fruit trees. The grape, along with sesame, peas, onions, coriander and cucumber, was introduced to China when emperors of the Han dynasty first explored interests beyond their western frontiers. Then, theoretically, the Western pear could have been brought into Xianjiang. But it was even earlier that Chinese fruits moved west, into Iran: the peach grew so well there that by c.300 BC it was regarded as a Persian fruit, an association shown in its later Latin name, Prunus persica.18 It is thus entirely conceivable that Chinese pears reached Iran at an early period and thence possibly continued further west to influence the development of the Western pear.

Many avenues along which fruits might travel opened up as a result of the co-operation that existed between the Chinese and Iranian empires in guarding the east–west routes through Central Asia, as well as other trade and cultural exchanges. We find, for instance, in a manuscript dated to around AD 850 and entitled ‘The Investigation of Commerce’ that imports from China are included among an immense array of goods brought from far and wide to Iraq and to Baghdad, then the capital of the Muslim world. Coming in via the Persian Gulf from China were ‘silk-stuffs, silks, chinaware, paper, ink, peacocks, racing horses’ and many more items from ‘brocades’ to ‘drugs’. In addition, from Isfahan in Iran, merchants delivered ‘China pears’ along with ‘refined and raw honey, quinces, apples, salt, saffron … extra fine fruits, and fruit syrups’.19 Very probably, there were pears able to survive the months of overland travel from China and still capable of a further journey from Isfahan across the Zagros Mountains to Baghdad. Pips from these pears, deliberately planted or germinating from discarded cores, could have literally taken root in Isfahan’s genial climate. Then, Isfahan was a prominent trading post at the crossroads of the main north–south and east–west routes of Iran, later the Persian capital city and now one of the centres of commercial pear production.

More opportunities for the inflow of Chinese goods followed in the wake of successive waves of Turkic tribes from Central Asia and Mongol invaders. The Mongol Empire created by Genghis Khan and his descendants stretched from China to Europe, unifying a vast area through which trade, technologies and plants could spread. In its thirteenth-century western Ilkhanate, the founder – Genghis Khan’s grandson – not only brought in Chinese scholars, but introduced ‘rare fruit trees from India, China, Malaysia and Central Asia’ to his gardens in Tabriz, the capital of Azerbaijan.20 Then, both Tabriz and Isfahan received plaudits for their pears, as they do today, and boasted established named varieties in records compiled during the latter days of the Ilkhanate. Pears also excelled further north at Khoi (Khoy), near the city of Urmia in west Azerbaijan, which, like Tabriz, lay on the main route of the Silk Road. ‘It has many gardens,’ wrote the geographer and state accountant Mustawfi of Qazvin in 1340, ‘and the like of its grapes and Payghambari (Prophet’s) pears, for sweetness, size and flavour is found nowhere else. Its people are fair-skinned, being of Chinese descent.’21 Snippets like these may not add up to any evidence for cross-fertilisation between Western and Asian pears in Iran but they do suggest a milieu in which this could have occurred. There is a pear local to Mashhad in north-east Iran that recent genetic studies suggest is such a cross, and also one from Isfahan.22 Mashhad was well situated for this fruitful marriage, being again on the Silk Road and long acclaimed for its fruit plantations, while Isfahan is at the centre of east–west trade routes. We can only conjecture that the influence of Asian pears spread further westwards, although certain ancient Caucasian varieties show features common to Western and Asian pears.

Deliberate crosses between Asian and European pears have been made, with the earliest recorded hybrids probably those raised in nineteenth-century America. There are breeding programmes in many countries with the aim of creating pears that bear a combination of Western and Asian qualities. But, whether any ancient European variety has any connection with Asian pears is an open question, though I personally suspect that this may be case. There is some evidence for this in the variety Crassane, which dates from the seventeenth century and does show Asian features in its flowers, foliage and, to an extent, in the fruit. It is a type of bergamot pear, of which the first example was probably the ‘Bergamotte’ recorded in 1532 in Italy. Both were landmark pears, acclaimed not only for their novel rounded and flattened form, but also their distinctive, aromatic taste that marked them out from others. According to one contemporary account, ‘Bergamotte’ came from Ottoman Turkey and took its name from beg, indicating ‘king’ or ‘Lord’ and armud, meaning ‘pear’ in the language of the peoples of the Caucasus.23 It is not improbable that ‘Bergamotte’ was imported, since there was considerable trade and contact between Italy and the Ottomans, but there are other suggestions for its place of origin.

NOTES

1. Hedrick, U.P., Pears of New York, 1921, pp. 41–2; Postman, J.D., ‘The Endicott Pear Tree: Oldest Living Fruit Tree in North America’: http://www.arsgrin.gov/cor/pyrus/endicott.pear.html
2. Ouseley, W., Travels in Persia, 1823, vol. 2, pp. 53, 168. A collection of Persian drinking spoons is held at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
3. Challice, J.C. and Westwood, M.N., ‘Numerical taxonomic studies of the genus Pyrus using both chemical and botanical characters’, Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, 1973, no. 67, pp. 121–48; Krüssmann, G., Manual of Cultivated Broad-Leaved Trees and Shrubs, 1978, pp. 72–8; Bell, R.L., ‘Pears (Pyrus)’, in Genetic Resources of Temperate Fruit and Nut Crops, J.N. Moore and J.R. Ballington, eds, 1990, vol. 2, pp. 657–97.
4. Zohary, D. and Hopf, M., Domestication of Plants in the Old World, 3rd edn, 2000, pp. 175–8.
5. Vavilov, N.I., ‘Wild Progenitors of the Fruit Trees of Turkestan and the Caucasus and the Problem of the Origin of Fruit Trees’ in Ninth International Horticultural Congress Report. London 1930, Royal Horticultural Society, 1930, pp. 271–86.
6. For information and a translation from Sabeti, H., Trees and Shrubs of Iran, Iranian Ministry of Agriculture and Natural Resources, 1976, my thanks to Dr H. Abdollahi.
7. Safarpoor Shorbakhlo, M., Bahar, M., Tabatabee, B.E.S. and Abdollahi, H., ‘Determination of genetic diversity in pear (Pyrus spp.) using microsatellite markers’, Iranian Journal of Horticultural Science and Technology, 2008, vol. 9, pp. 113–28; Erfani, J., Ebadi, Abdollahi, H., Fatahi, R., ‘Genetic diversity of some pear cultivars and genotypes using simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers’, Plant Molecular Biology Reporter, 2012, vol. 30, no. 5., pp. 1065–72.
8. Vavilov, op. cit.
9. Zohary, op. cit., p. 177.
10. Imber, C., ‘Status of Orchards and Fruit-Trees in Ottoman Law’ in Studies in Ottoman History and Law, 1996, pp. 206–16.
11. Decaisne, J., Le Jardin fruitier du muséum, 1858, vol. 1, trans. M.N. Westwood as Pear Varieties and Species, 1996, pp. 117–19.
12. Šiftar, A., ‘Snow Pear Pyrus nivalis Jacq: Wild growth of cultivated tree species in Slovenia’ in Zbornik referatov slovenskega sadjarskega kongresa z mednarodno udelezbo Krško, 2004, pp. 509–52.
13. Decaisne, op. cit., pp. 151–3, plate 21; see also Directory.
14. Morgan, J. and Lean, A., ‘Studies on the Pear Collection of the Defra National Fruit Collection, Brogdale, Kent’, unpublished; these varieties are noted in the Directory.
15. Bunyard, E.A., ‘The Pears of New York’, The Journal of Pomology and Horticultural Science, 1922–4, vol. III, p. 155.
16. The book Shi Gee written about 100 BC, quoted in ‘Pears in China’ by Tsuin Shen, HortScience, 1980, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 13–17; Teng, Y. and Tanabe, K., ‘Reconsideration on the Origin of Cultivated Pears Native to East Asia’ in IVth International Symposium Taxonomy of Cultivated Plants, C.G. Davidson and P. Trehane, eds, Acta Horticulturae, ISHA, 2004, no. 634, pp. 175–82. As with Western species, a number of Asian species are used as rootstocks, e.g. birch leaf pear, Pyrus betulifolia, and Pyrus calleryana, which is also planted in the West as an ornamental tree.
17. Teng, Y., Tanabe, K., Tamura, F., Itai, A., ‘Genetic relationships of pear cultivars in Xinjiang, China, as measured by RAPD markers’, Journal of Horticultural Science & Biotechnology, 2001, vol. 76, no. 6, pp. 771–9.
18. Needham, J., Science and Civilisation in China, 1954, reprinted 1979, vol. 1, p. 175; Theophrastus’s Enquiry into Plants, trans. A. Hort, Loeb edn, 1980, vol. II, p. 33.
19. Lopez, R.S. and Raymond, I.W., ‘Imports of Iraq’ from ‘Al-Jahiz: The Investigations of Commerce’ in Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World, 1955, pp. 28–9.
20. Watson, A.M., Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 1983, 2nd edn, 2008, p. 119.
21. The Geographical Part of the Nuzhat-al-Qulub, composed by Hamd-Allah Mustawfi of Qazwin in 740 (AD1340), trans. G. Le Strange, 1919, facsimile reprint 2009, pp. 55–6, 80, 86. Payghambari/Peighambari is a synonym for Sard Roudi/Sard Roud, which is also the name of a village near Tabriz; payghambar, meaning ‘prophet’, signifies importance.
22. Babaei, F., Abdollahi, H. and Khorramdel Azad, M., ‘Detection of Pear S-Alleles by Setting up a Revised Identified Systems’, Acta Horticulturae, 2013, pp. 339–43; Erfani et al., op. cit.; Nikzad Gharehaghaji, A., Abdollahi, H., Azani, K., Shojaeiyan, A., Naghi Padasht, M., Dondini, L. and De Franceschi, P., ‘Contribution of Western and Eastern Species to the Iranian Pear Germplasm revealed by the characterization of S-Genotypes, Acta Horticulturae, 2014, ISHS, no. 1032, pp. 159–67.
23. Morgan and Lean, op.cit; Messisbugo, C., Libro Novo …, 1557, facsimile reprint 1982, p. 21; ‘Pere’ by Bellini, E., Mariotti, P. and Pisani, P.L., in Baldini, E., Bellini, E., Fiorino, P., Pisani, P.L. and Scaramuzzi, F., Agrumi, frutta e uve nella Firenze di Bartolomeo Bimbi pittore Mediceo, 23rd International Horticultural Congress, Florence, 1990, p. 118.

Written by Joan Morgan in "The Book of Pears", Ebury Press (part of the Penguin Random House group of companies), UK, 2015, excerpts chapter 1. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.