Courthouse to cut passe pear trees
Posted on Tuesday, December 30, 2008
The Bradford pear tree - the leisure suit of the plant world - is about to be as dead as disco at the Pulaski County Courthouse.
Five of the trees, which line the south and west sides of the Pulaski County Courthouse, were cut down Monday, and County Judge Buddy Villines says that's a good start. Those trees had been damaged by storm or disease, Villines said. Two trees, also storm damaged, were removed earlier this year. Today the eight remaining trees on the courthouse's northwest corner at Broadway and West Markham streets are getting the ax.
Safety is the motivating concern, the judge said, because the fruitless pear trees get so big, their limbs are notoriously weak and they can fall into traffic because of wind or ice.
"I'm really concerned that's going to happen on Broadway. It's not a good street tree." he said.
Villines, about to start his 10th term as county judge, said the trees predate him and he doesn't know who planted them. He said the county has tried to trim the trees back, but their limbs quickly grow out. Removing them is the last resort, he said.
"I don't like taking down trees," he said.
Three years ago, Villines took a lot of heat when county employees over-pruned six willow oaks at the courthouse, forcing them to be destroyed. The director of the city's Urban Forestry Division even complained about the poor handling of the hardwoods.
But, in an apparent nod to that issue, Urban Forestry workers are removing the trees for the county and should finish the remaining trees today, said Mark Webre, deputy director of the city of Little Rock's Parks and Recreation Department, which includes the forestry division.
Finding a fan of the pear trees was impossible on Monday. Little Rock lawyer John Baker, founder of the nonprofit Tree Streets, took time from his vacation to denounce them.
"I have a strong opinion," he said. "Everything wrong with urban trees ... is found in Bradford pears. I'm glad the judge is doing it."
The volunteer organization plants and prunes close to 1,000 trees in Little Rock's downtown neighborhoods, but wouldn't under any circumstances plant a Bradford, he said.
"They are pretty much the biggest scam perpetrated on the tree-growing public ... like the Edsel was perpetrated on the carbuying public," he said. "We've never planted a Bradford pear and we never will."
Bradford pears were trendy 20 years or so, said Little Rock architect Tommy Jameson, who participated in the renovation of the courthouse's clock tower 14 years ago. They're pretty when they flower and when their leaves turn color in the fall, but they grow too big too fast and their limbs get brittle, he said.
"They're not a very good longterm landscaping specimen," Jameson said. "They get big, they get unwieldy and then ... they split right down the middle."
Leisure suits might've been attractive back in the 1970s, but they don't look good now. And everybody loved Bradford pears, but their good looks were deceiving, said landscape architect Liz Frazier of Hot Springs.
"They were the perfect tree, with the perfect shape ... lollipop," she said. "Once it gets to be 25 years, its beautiful shape doesn't hold up."
Frazier, owner of LA Design Co. and a former chairman of the Arkansas State Board of Landscape Architects, said the trees were frequently planted too close to buildings and power lines, but because of their weak limbs and large growth, their owners had to have them removed.
"They're diseased. They're weak and they don't age well," she said. "It was a good little tree. It was just too good to be true."
Villines said he's not planning on immediately replacing the trees, but he hasn't written off more trees. He said the Bradford pears have been a barricade too long to the walking park on the courthouse's west side.
However, the Little Rock Garden Club, which donated the courthouse's Alexander-Butler Rose Garden to the county 50 years ago and still works to maintain it, would like to see something nice replace the trees.
"We know Judge Villines will do the right thing by planting something lovely and long-living in place of the Bradford pears," said Gladys Whitney, club president.
Even casual gardeners know better than to plant the pear trees. Johnny McMahan of Bauxite, a visitor to the courthouse on Monday, said he saw them go bad at his mother's Benton home.
"Bradford pears are a heartache," he said.
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