Starting October 1, 2024, nurseries in South Carolina will be prohibited from selling the trees. The state will become the second in the country to ban them behind Ohio, where sales will cease in 2023.

Many nurseries have already stopped selling the trees, although they can still be found at some national retailers.

The ban affects the Bradford pear tree and any other tree grown from the Pyrus calleryana rootstock.

State lawmakers and the state’s Crop Pest Commission approved the ban after an advisory committee added the tree to the state’s list of plant pests.

The Bradford pear was introduced to the United States in the 1950s as a solution to the “fire blight” – which causes the tips of pear branches to turn brown and die – which affected the European pears that dotted cityscapes, David Coyle said, assistant professor of Forest Health and Invasive Species at Clemson, which started a Bradford bounty program at Clemson two years ago to encourage residents to cut and replace Bradford pears.

It was a fast-growing tree resistant to fire blight and considered sterile, so its seeds would not reproduce, Coyle said. The United States Department of Agriculture approved the tree and it was marketed for residential landscaping.

It became popular for its low price and rapid growth as a shade tree, but arborists noticed as early as the 1960s that it had spread invasively.

Although technically sterile, its fruit can pollinate with any other pear variety and produces Callery pear trees with viable fruit and sharp, strong thorns, Coyle said.

Durant Ashmore, a veteran landscaper from Greenville, said he never liked the “lollipop in the landscape” look of the white flowers and shape of Bradford pears, so he didn’t use them.

But plenty of other landscapers have, and about 20 years ago Ashmore said he started noticing the spread of Callery pears in fallow fields in the upstate.

It started storming the trees around the same time that experts in the field noticed the same problem. Within a few years, most local nurseries stopped selling them and some towns removed them from lists of trees that developers could plant in new subdivisions.

“Bradford pears became popular, on the one hand, because they are so cheap, but we knew early on that they had structural problems and were dangerous,” said Ashmore, a 40-year-old landscaper who owns Durant Ashmore Landscape Nursery.

As birds and squirrels ate Bradford pears and their waste allowed Callery pear to cross, fast-growing, early-flowering trees began to smother the natural landscape in fields across the state and country.

Where pines, then oaks, maples and dogwoods thrived normally, Callery pears now dominate. And the thorns of Callery pears are strong enough to pierce tractor tires, so normal land looping is not an option for ridding fields of trees, which have become a thorn in the side of farmers, Ashmore said.

Stopping the sale of trees is just a tactic to slow the spread of invasive species, said Steven Long, the state’s plant regulator and chair of the Carolina Invasive Species Advisory Committee. South.

It is up to residents and local governments to remove existing trees and replace them with natural species, he said.

It may take 50 years to bring the Callery pear population under control, he said.

“Banning Bradford pears is one thing, but we’re going to face the effects of Callery pear for decades, if not centuries,” said Ashmore, who wrote a viral column, The Curse of the Bradford Pear, in 2016 in The Greenville News.

Long noted that although the sale of Bradford pears becomes illegal, it is still legal to own the tree, although he encouraged residents to consider replacing the trees with another variety.

Banning an invasive species that is actively sold is a rare step for state regulators to take, Long said. They spent two years collecting feedback and contacting industry representatives before making a decision, he said.

“When you plan to pull something like this out of the industry, it may be what’s best for the landscape, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get public support for it,” he said.

In this case, industry representatives did not offer much resistance.

Long called this a new precedent for the invasive species advisory group that may seek to add other invasive species to the pest list in the years to come.

Read the original article by Nathaniel Cary in The Greenville News here.