Pears: History and Origins
The pear is really two fruits with two histories. The soft, buttery European pear (Pyrus communis) — the Bartlett, the Comice, the Conference — was tamed from wild trees of Europe and the Caucasus and reached its peak in the gardens of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Belgium and France. The crisp, round Asian pear (Pyrus pyrifolia and its relatives) was domesticated separately in China, where pears have been grown for well over two thousand years and where about three-quarters of the world's pears are still picked today. Genome studies published in 2018 confirmed what gardeners had long suspected: the two were domesticated independently, from different wild species, at opposite ends of Eurasia.
Table of Contents
- Two Pears, Two Domestications
- Pears Before Farming: The Lake Villages
- What the Word "Pear" Tells Us
- Homer's Orchard and Theophrastus's Seedlings
- Rome: Cato, Pliny and Forty-One Varieties
- Monastery Orchards and the Warden Pear
- Perry: The Pear as a Drink
- The Butter Pear: Hardenpont and Van Mons
- Williams, Bartlett, Comice and Conference
- Fire Blight and the Move West
- The Asian Pear's Own Story
- Pears Today
- Key Research Papers
- Connections
- Featured Videos
Two Pears, Two Domestications
Botanists place all pears in the genus Pyrus, a group of a few dozen wild species and five domesticated ones. The genus is old: the 2018 resequencing study led by Jun Wu at Nanjing Agricultural University estimates that the Pyrus lineage arose in the mountains of south-western China some 55 to 65 million years ago and then spread along mountain chains both eastward and westward across Eurasia. That ancient split is why there are “oriental” and “occidental” pears at all: by the time people started farming, the two branches had been evolving apart for millions of years.
The European pear, Pyrus communis, is the only domesticated species of the western branch. Its wild relatives still grow in woods and hedgerows from western Europe to the Caucasus, where they are classified as the subspecies pyraster (the wild pear of Europe) and caucasica (the wild pear of the Caucasus and Anatolia). Both remain fully interfertile with orchard pears. Wu and colleagues, who resequenced 113 pear accessions from around the world and compared more than 18 million genetic variants, found that the European wild pear P. pyraster is the most closely related to cultivated European pears and is the likely progenitor species.
The Asian pears came from the eastern branch. Three cultivated species are recognised: P. pyrifolia (the sand pear or nashi, native to southern China and northern Indochina), P. bretschneideri (the Chinese white pear) and P. ussuriensis (the hardy Ussurian or Manchurian pear of the far north-east). The genome paper's central conclusion was that Asian and European pears carry separate signatures of selection — different genes swept to fixation for flesh texture, sugar, acidity, aroma and the gritty “stone cells” — which is the molecular fingerprint of two independent domestications. Unlike most crops, which descend from a single wild species, the pear was tamed at least twice, from different wild ancestors, by people who never met.
The Silk Road later stitched the two branches together at the edges: the same study found that the Xinjiang pear (P. sinkiangensis) of western China is a hybrid carrying both Asian and European ancestry.
Pears Before Farming: The Lake Villages
People ate pears long before anyone planted one. Small, hard wild pears turn up among the charred and waterlogged plant remains of Neolithic and Bronze Age settlements across Europe. The best-known finds come from the prehistoric pile dwellings around Lake Zurich in Switzerland, where waterlogged sediments preserved the seeds, fruit halves and even dried slices of wild fruit that villagers had gathered. Archaeobotanists — specialists who identify ancient plant remains under the microscope — treat these as evidence of collecting rather than growing: the fruits are of wild size, and there is nothing at these sites that shows orchards.
The standard reference on Old World crop origins, Daniel Zohary and Maria Hopf's Domestication of Plants in the Old World, is careful on this point. Pear remains from prehistoric Europe show that the fruit was collected from the wild, but reliable evidence of pear cultivation first appears in the writings of the Greeks and Romans. That is later than for wheat, barley, olives or grapes, and the reason is biological. A pear grown from seed does not come true — the seedling is a genetic lottery and usually a disappointing one — so a good pear can only be multiplied by grafting: cutting a twig from the tree you like and joining it to the rootstock of another so that it grows on as a clone. Pears could not really be domesticated until grafting was understood, and that seems to have happened in the eastern Mediterranean during the first millennium BC.
What the Word "Pear" Tells Us
The English word is old and borrowed. Pear comes from Old English pere or peru, which the Anglo-Saxons took from a spoken Latin form pera, itself the plural of classical Latin pirum, “a pear” (the tree was pirus; the medieval spelling pyrus is the one botanists kept). The same Latin root gives French poire, Italian pera, Spanish pera, German Birne and Dutch peer. Latin in turn seems related to Greek apion (the fruit) and apios (the tree), but neither language invented the word: etymologists describe it as a loan from an unknown, probably pre-Indo-European Mediterranean language. In other words, the word for pear was already in the region before Greek or Latin speakers arrived — a small linguistic hint that the fruit was, too.
In Chinese the pear is lí (梨), a word with its own long literary history; Japanese nashi and Korean bae name the crisp Asian pear that English speakers, confusingly, sometimes call an “apple pear” because of its round shape. The drink made from fermented pears is perry, from Old French peré, from the same Latin root.
Homer's Orchard and Theophrastus's Seedlings
The earliest literary pear is in the Odyssey. In Book 7, when Odysseus reaches the palace of King Alcinous of the Phaeacians, the poet pauses to describe the royal orchard outside the courtyard: a great walled garden “full of beautiful trees — pears, pomegranates, and the most delicious apples,” with figs and olives, where the fruit never fails winter or summer and “pear grows on pear, apple on apple, and fig on fig.” It is a fairy-tale garden, but the list is a real one: these were the fruit trees a Greek audience of the eighth or seventh century BC would recognise as a king's wealth.
Three centuries later Theophrastus of Eresos (c. 371–287 BC), Aristotle's pupil and successor, wrote the first systematic botany in Enquiry into Plants. He knew exactly what makes pears hard to farm. Seedlings of cultivated pears, he wrote, “give a poor sort of wild pears,” just as apple seedlings turn out sour and cultivated pomegranates degenerate — which, he says, is why growers were told to graft. He also distinguished the cultivated pear from the wild one (Greek achras) and remarked that no amount of tending would turn a wild pear into a cultivated one.
Rome: Cato, Pliny and Forty-One Varieties
Rome turned the pear into a farm crop. The oldest surviving Latin prose work, Cato the Elder's On Agriculture (second century BC), tells the estate owner which pears to plant — “the volema, the Anician frost-pears (these are excellent when preserved in boiled wine), the Tarentine, the must-pear, the gourd-pear, and as many other varieties as possible” — and how to keep them: dried, or put up in boiled-down grape must. Cato gives grafting instructions for pears in the same breath as figs, olives and vines, down to the phase of the moon, and notes that pears and apples may be grafted in spring, around the summer solstice and at the vintage.
Two hundred years later Pliny the Elder devoted a chapter of his Natural History (Book 15) to pears; his nineteenth-century English editors headed it “Forty-one varieties of the pear,” which is a fair count of the names he runs through. He ranks the Crustumian pear first of all for flavour, then the Falernian, “so called from the drink which it affords, so abundant is its juice” — an aside that commentators read as an early reference to perry. He lists pears named after the families who introduced them (Decimian, Dolabellian, Pomponian, Licerian), a Syrian pear whose juice was called “milk,” a late acid Anician pear (Cato's variety, still going), and the Tiberian, “a particular favourite with the Emperor Tiberius.” Pliny also recommended stewing pears with honey, and thought them heavy eating raw.
Roman cultivation carried the grafted pear north across Gaul and into Britain, and the orchard varieties have been there ever since.
Monastery Orchards and the Warden Pear
After Rome, the skills of grafting and orchard-keeping survived best behind monastery walls, and the medieval pear is largely a monastic story. Pear cultivation is documented in Spanish agricultural texts of the twelfth century, and across northern Europe the religious houses kept the named varieties alive.
England's most famous medieval pear was the warden. The name came to mean any hard pear that never really softens on the tree and must be cooked to be eaten — a “baking pear” — and it is tied to the Cistercian Warden Abbey in Bedfordshire, where the variety later called the Black Worcester is first mentioned in the thirteenth century. Records from 1388 show such pears forming an important part of the monks' winter diet, precisely because they stored so well. Wardens were stewed in wine and spices and baked into “warden pies,” and the dish was ordinary enough for Shakespeare to put it in a shepherd's shopping list: “I must have saffron to colour the warden pies” (The Winter's Tale, Act 4). The habit of cooking hard winter pears slowly with a little sweetness survives as the poached and baked pears of English and French kitchens.
Perry: The Pear as a Drink
For much of Europe's history the pear was as much a drink as a fruit. Pliny's Falernian pear “abundant in juice” is the first hint; by the fourth century Saint Jerome could refer to a fermented pear drink as piracium. After the fall of Rome, perry-making took root in northern France, and it was after the Norman Conquest that references to English perry appear.
By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries perry was thoroughly established in the west of England, above all in the Three Counties of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire, whose heavy soils and mild climate suited pears better than apples. Perry pears are a world of their own — small, astringent, inedible fruit from enormous, long-lived trees, with varieties peculiar to single parishes — and the saying “plant pears for your heirs” records how slowly they come into bearing. Perry reached a peak in the eighteenth century, when wars with France made imported wine scarce, and then declined through the twentieth as farming changed and old orchards were grubbed out. A mass-produced sparkling perry made in Somerset from the 1950s kept the name alive commercially, and the traditional drink has since been revived by small producers. In Normandy the perry of Domfront won French appellation status in 2002 and a European protected designation in 2006, which requires at least 40 percent of the local Plant de Blanc pear.
The Butter Pear: Hardenpont and Van Mons
The pear most people picture today — juicy, melting, sweet, with flesh the French call fondante — is a surprisingly recent creation, and it was made in the Low Countries and northern France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Medieval and Renaissance pears were mostly cassant: crisp, breaking, often gritty. The transformation to beurré, the “butter pear,” has a founder.
Nicolas Hardenpont (1705–1774) was a secular priest at the church of Saint-Nicolas-en-Havré in Mons, in what is now Belgium. In his garden at the foot of Mont Panisel he did something orchardists had been warned against since Theophrastus: he raised pears deliberately from seed, sowing thousands, keeping the rare good one, and grafting only from those. Out of that patience came the Beurré d'Hardenpont, the Beurré Rancé, the Délices d'Hardenpont, the Passe Colmar and the Glou Morceau (“greedy mouthful”), several of which are still grown. Belgian pomologists credit him with tipping the pear from brittle to buttery.
His great successor was Jean-Baptiste Van Mons (1765–1842), a Brussels-born chemist, physician and professor at Leuven who took seedling breeding to an industrial scale. His method, in his own words, was “to sow, to re-sow, to sow again, to sow perpetually, in short to do nothing but sow” — selecting from each generation of seedlings the ones that fruited earliest and best and sowing their seeds in turn. Over some sixty years he is credited with about forty superior varieties, and two of the pears in every American supermarket, the Bosc and the Anjou, are traditionally attributed to his nurseries or his circle (the exact parentage of both is uncertain; the Bosc, named for the French naturalist Louis Bosc, was first recorded in the early 1800s in Belgium or France, and the Anjou was known in Europe as Nec Plus Meuris before it acquired a misleading French regional name in England and America). The “Beurré” in so many pear names is their signature.
Williams, Bartlett, Comice and Conference
A handful of varieties raised between about 1765 and 1885 still account for most of the European-type pears in the world, and each has a traceable birth.
Williams' Bon Chrétien, the most widely grown pear on earth, is thought to have arisen between 1765 and 1770 in the garden of a schoolmaster named Stair at Aldermaston in Berkshire, England, which is why old books also call it the Aldermaston or Stair's pear. A nurseryman named Williams acquired it and spread it through England under his own name. In 1799 James Carter imported trees into the United States, where they were planted on the Roxbury, Massachusetts estate of Thomas Brewer; when Enoch Bartlett of Dorchester later bought the property he propagated and sold the unlabelled pear as the “Bartlett,” and only in 1828, when freshly imported Williams trees arrived, was it realised that the two were the same. By then the American name had stuck, and it has never been dislodged: the pear is a Williams in Europe, Australia and South Africa and a Bartlett in North America.
Doyenné du Comice, which the English pomologist Edward Bunyard called the perfect combination of flavour, aroma and texture, was raised in 1849–50 in the garden of the Comice Horticole at Angers in the Loire valley, by the gardener Dhommé under its president Millet de la Turtaudière; a plaque in the garden records it. Conference was raised by Thomas Francis Rivers at the Rivers nursery in Sawbridgeworth, Hertfordshire, and took its odd name from the National British Pear Conference of 1885 in London, where it won first prize; it now makes up around nine-tenths of the pears grown in the United Kingdom and is the leading pear of northern Europe. In America the Anjou was recommended for general cultivation by the American Pomological Congress in 1852, and the small, sweet Seckel — said to be named after the Pennsylvania farmer who introduced it near Philadelphia in the late eighteenth century, and praised by Thomas Jefferson, who grew it at Monticello — is the best-known pear of American origin.
There are thousands of named cultivars, but some twenty to twenty-five European and ten to twenty Asian varieties supply virtually all the pears of commerce.
Fire Blight and the Move West
The European pear crossed the Atlantic with the colonists and did well at first, but North America held a native enemy that Europe did not: fire blight, a bacterial disease of pears, apples and their relatives that blackens blossoms and shoots as if scorched and can kill a mature tree in a season. The disease is believed to be indigenous to North America, and eastern growers knew it as a scourge of pear orchards long before anyone understood it. Its cause was worked out at the University of Illinois by Thomas J. Burrill (1839–1916), who showed in the late 1870s and early 1880s that a bacterium — he named it Micrococcus amylovorus, today Erwinia amylovora — was responsible. It was the first time any plant disease had been traced to a bacterium, and it made the pear tree a founding document of plant pathology.
Fire blight is why the American pear industry sits where it does. The humid summers of the eastern states favour the bacterium, and the European pear is more susceptible than the apple; growers in the drier valleys of the Pacific slope, by contrast, could keep it in check. Through the twentieth century pear growing consolidated in Oregon, Washington and California. Bartlett became the canning pear of the United States — the fruit in tinned pear halves, purée and nectar — while Anjou led the fresh market: in 2004 Anjou alone was about a third of reported United States production, with Oregon the leading state. Breeders have produced blight-resistant rootstocks, though resistance in the roots does not protect the grafted top; where the disease is bad, the old remedy is still the pruning saw.
Europe was spared for a century and a half. The bacterium is thought to have reached northern Europe in the 1950s in contaminated fruit containers from the United States, and it spread across the Continent over the following decades.
The Asian Pear's Own Story
While Europe was breeding for melting flesh, East Asia was breeding for something else entirely: a round, crisp, intensely juicy fruit that is picked ripe, eaten crunchy like an apple, and keeps for months. Chinese pear cultivation is ancient — the Han-dynasty record of pears carried to Xinjiang is two thousand years old, and cultivation is generally reckoned to be considerably older than that — and it produced its own families of varieties: the white pears of northern China (P. bretschneideri), the sand pears of the south (P. pyrifolia) and the frost-hardy Ussurian pears of the north-east.
The nashi of Japan and the bae of Korea belong to the sand-pear line. Japan's modern industry rests on three cultivars with known birthdays: Nijisseiki (“Twentieth Century”), a chance seedling found in 1898; Kosui, released in 1959 and now the country's most important pear; and Hosui (1972). In Korea the grated pear is a traditional meat tenderiser and sweetener in the marinade for bulgogi, and in Chinese domestic tradition a pear steamed with rock sugar is a home remedy for a dry cough — a custom worth recording as custom, not as evidence.
Asian pears travelled late: cultivars of P. pyrifolia are now grown in Australia and New Zealand (Australian commercial production began only in 1980), in the United States and in South Asia.
Pears Today
The world grows roughly 26 to 28 million tonnes of pears a year, and the geography is lopsided in a way no other major temperate fruit quite matches. In the FAO's figures for 2022 world production was about 26.3 million tonnes, of which China grew about 19.3 million — roughly 73 percent — and the most recent tallies put China nearer three-quarters of the total. Nobody else comes close: the United States, Argentina, Turkey, South Africa and Italy each produce around half a million tonnes, with Belgium and the Netherlands (Conference country) not far behind. The Asian pear, in other words, is by weight the world's pear; the European pear is the one the rest of the world exports and eats.
Within Europe the varieties have narrowed to the nineteenth-century champions: Conference dominates Britain and the Low Countries and has its own protected geographical indication for the fruit grown in Savoie (1996, the only such status for a pear in France); Williams and Comice hold the south; Abate Fétel leads in Italy. North America eats Bartlett, Anjou and Bosc from the Pacific Northwest and California, and the southern hemisphere — Argentina, South Africa, Chile, Australia — ships Williams and Packham's Triumph north in the northern winter.
What has changed least is the fruit's odd biology. A European pear still will not ripen properly on the tree; it is picked hard and finished in the kitchen, as the medieval warden was. The sorbitol and fibre that make pears so kind to sluggish digestion are the subject of the Pears hub and its Benefits pages.
Key Research Papers
The genomics of pear origin and domestication, the phylogeny of the genus, the standard archaeobotanical reference, the fire-blight literature and a review of the pear's nutrition. Each identifier was checked against Crossref before it was listed.
- Wu J, Wang Y, Xu J, Korban SS, et al. (2018). Diversification and independent domestication of Asian and European pears. Genome Biology. — doi:10.1186/s13059-018-1452-y
- Wu J, Wang Z, Shi Z, Zhang S, et al. (2013). The genome of the pear (Pyrus bretschneideri Rehd.). Genome Research. — doi:10.1101/gr.144311.112
- Chagné D, Crowhurst RN, Pindo M, Thrimawithana A, et al. (2014). The Draft Genome Sequence of European Pear (Pyrus communis L. 'Bartlett'). PLoS ONE. — doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0092644
- Linsmith G, Rombauts S, Montanari S, Deng CH, et al. (2019). Pseudo-chromosome-length genome assembly of a double haploid “Bartlett” pear (Pyrus communis L.). GigaScience. — doi:10.1093/gigascience/giz138
- Volk GM, Richards CM, Henk AD, Reilley AA, et al. (2006). Diversity of Wild Pyrus communis Based on Microsatellite Analyses. Journal of the American Society for Horticultural Science. — doi:10.21273/JASHS.131.3.408
- Zheng X, Cai D, Potter D, Postman J, Liu J, Teng Y (2014). Phylogeny and evolutionary histories of Pyrus L. revealed by phylogenetic trees and networks based on data from multiple DNA sequences. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. — doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2014.07.009
- Silva GJ, Souza TM, Barbieri RL, Costa de Oliveira A (2014). Origin, Domestication, and Dispersing of Pear (Pyrus spp.). Advances in Agriculture. — doi:10.1155/2014/541097
- Zohary D, Hopf M, Weiss E (2012). Domestication of Plants in the Old World, 4th edition. Oxford University Press. — doi:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199549061.001.0001
- Malnoy M, Martens S, Norelli JL, Barny M-A, et al. (2012). Fire Blight: Applied Genomic Insights of the Pathogen and Host. Annual Review of Phytopathology. — doi:10.1146/annurev-phyto-081211-172931
- Reiland H, Slavin J (2015). Systematic Review of Pears and Health. Nutrition Today. — doi:10.1097/NT.0000000000000112
PubMed Topic Searches
External Authoritative Resources
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History Book 15, the chapter on pears (Perseus Digital Library, Bostock translation)
- Cato the Elder, On Agriculture (Loeb translation at LacusCurtius) — pear varieties in chapter 7, grafting in chapters 40–41
- Homer, Odyssey Book 7 (Butler translation) — the garden of Alcinous
- FAOSTAT crop production statistics (pears)