If you dare to look into the taxonomy of pears, you will find some treasures hidden in the mountains in France far outside cultivation. These are not “escaped” pears but subspecies that someone in taxonomy has gone to the trouble to identify and catalog. They exist on paper as a single line of text.

I received seed of a few populations from a forester that sent me not only the seed but a print out from those journals not found on the internet. Here is one of those species: Pyrus communis subspecies balansae. It is thought to be the origin of the pear we eat today.

Surprisingly it’s not edible and is highly astringent. The squirrels love it and dive into the seeds in July. How a human found or created an edible fruit from this subspecies over time seems impossible. But it did happen.

These vigorous trees were hammered by deer and shaped by drought and fire blight before settling down to a few trees on a steep slope with shallow top soil at my farm.

I can enjoy the fragrance and beauty of the flowers. Possibly the wood quality is perfect for making musical instruments like the wooden pear recorder I have. Maybe I can find a way to harness the nutrients in the fruit while dreaming of the pear we have today and how we got from balansae to the pear we eat. That must of been quite a culinary journey. In the meantime, my balansae is balanced as a small population on a hillside started in the middle of a field where nothing grew before. That is a pear.