It’s odd really, the stuff we don’t know sometimes. It can be something as innocuous as a tree you walk by everyday, or as grand as knowing who you are. It just so happens I used to not know either! But luckily, this assignment informed me of the former. Today I learned about the Bradford Pear, one of the funkiest, gnarliest, must pungent trees I had never heard of… yet I walked by it every day. This truly does make me wonder what ELSE I don’t know. Anyway, I digress.

When I think of when I was a wee lad, walking home from school in the spring, I recall something funky. Often, I would be overcome with a scent that was reminiscent of pool grade chlorine, unsavory laundry detergent, and candle wax. I kind of think it would smell like that unholy krabby-patty sponge-bob made to try and scare a way the health inspector:

I remember I would often grimace when its miasmic tendrils infiltrated my nostrils. It turns out the olfactory-perpetrator of this scent was the Bradley Pear. Honestly, it is quite a beautiful tree. It has pretty white flowers that blossom for quite some time in the early spring. However, as I dug deeper into this “Bradley Pear” I found out that I was judging a book by its cover… I should’ve listened to what my nose was telling me, not my eyes!

As it turns out, the Bradley Pear is incredibly bad for the environment. It has a very short lifespan (relative to other types of trees) and apparently has one of the weakest branch structures around. Most notably, however, it is apparently has spurred an exponential increase in pear tree growth (the Bradley pear does not bear edible fruit). The B. Pear itself cannot reproduce with another B. Pear, but it can cross pollinate with any other type of pear. This includes the Chinese Callery pear, which forms invasively and harms any other type of vegetation.

Well, that was more information than you probably wanted to know about pears. However, I do think there is a valuable take away here: Always listen to your sniffer. I kid. I mean, you can if you want to. In reality, the takeaway is that there are so many details in your life that you think you understand, when in reality, you haven’t a clue! To me, that scent was just some funky plant. I didn’t even know it came from a tree. And that tree was a pear tree?!? Huh. The things you don’t know. There is always a detail you can learn more about!