Wow that is a first I have heard of Magness blighting badly. Interesting. How is your set on Warren? That is the issue down here for sure, not enough pears.
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Interesting, I was under impression that Magness and Warren have very similar FB resistance. Are there differences in their growth habit?
Warren is more FB resistant than magness. Here is a great article that tells the real story of the 2 pears “Market Watch: The magnificent Warren pear
The pear combines the best features of its Seckel and Comice ancestors. And its origin? Most likely Mississippi, of all places. It’s sweet and spicy, and it’s making a cameo appearance in Santa Monica.
November 25, 2011|By David Karp | Special to the Los Angeles Times
With the partial exception of Bartletts, great locally grown pears are scarce at farmers markets in Southern California, where warm winters and disease render cultivation problematic. This makes it all the more special that Al Courchesne of Frog Hollow Farm, a rock star organic fruit grower from Brentwood, Calif., an hour east of San Francisco, will make a cameo appearance the next two Wednesdays at the Santa Monica farmers market to sell his legendary Warren pears.
Arguably the most delicious pear variety in the world, praised by the likes of Alice Waters, Martha Stewart Living and Oprah Winfrey, the Warren combines the best features of its ancestors, with the intensely sweet, rich, spicy flavor of Seckel, and the larger size and voluptuous juiciness of Comice. And the mystery of its origins, heretofore never fully unraveled, is almost as delicious as its flavor.
The trail that leads to the Warren starts with fire blight, a bacterial disease that makes growing most pears virtually impossible in areas where warm spring rains are common; a winter chill is also required, which is why very few European pears are cultivated in the southern half of California.
Historically, one of the few pears of quality that was resistant to blight was the Seckel, tiny but superbly flavored, and discovered near Philadelphia around 1760. Were it not for its diminutive size, it would doubtless be the preeminent pear on the market today.
Starting before 1900, pear breeders sought to hybridize the disease resistance of the Seckel into larger-fruited varieties. In 1920, Merton B. Waite, a U.S. Department of Agriculture breeder in Maryland, came up with a seedling of the Seckel called the Giant Seckel that bore much larger fruit, and was still blight-resistant. But it was not quite as flavorful, and it never became widely grown.
Breeders working for the USDA in the mid-20th century crossed the Giant Seckel and the Comice and in 1960 released Magness, which was blight-resistant and unequaled in flavor. It was fairly widely planted at first, but it soon proved to be an erratic producer and mostly disappeared from cultivation in subsequent decades.
A curiously similar variety named the Warren was discovered by a highly respected amateur fruit grower, Thomas O. Warren, in a most unlikely locale, Hattiesburg, Miss., about 1976. In the first published description of his namesake pear, a short article that appeared in Pomona magazine in 1986, Warren wrote that he found the original tree “growing in the backyard of a friend.” Its ancestry at first was unknown.
He shared bud wood with fellow enthusiasts in the North American Fruit Explorers organization. Another story, meanwhile, circulated that he had “found it planted in front of a post office and USDA soil conservation service office.” However, according to Ram Fishman, a nurseryman and fruit connoisseur who wrote an excellent online essay about Magness and Warren pears, when questioned further about the variety, Warren allowed that he discovered it among “the remains of a test site used by Mississippi State University.” Aha!
Some seedlings from the cross from which the Magness was selected were sent to a branch station in Meridian, Miss., that has long since closed, according to Kearneysville, W. Va.-based Richard Bell, the current pear breeder for the USDA. It is likely that this station sent some of the seedlings, or grafted trees, to Mississippi State for testing, and that the experimental orchard had been abandoned by the 1970s. The hot, humid conditions in the Deep South are murder on pear trees, most of which would have succumbed to fire blight, especially if unsprayed. A resistant tree would have been extremely conspicuous; if a pear tree could survive untended in Mississippi, it could make it anywhere.
Warren, who died last year at age 96, may have been concerned in the years just after his discovery that someone at the USDA would be miffed that he had filched their experimental variety, and so devised a story about finding it in a friend’s backyard. Today, no one would care about the pedigree of a relatively obscure pear, were it not that it is so supremely delicious and that it is one of the very few varieties that can be grown in blight-prone areas such as the Deep South and parts of California, particularly by home gardeners disinclined to spray.
As word of the prodigy spread, many observers noted that the Warren seemed very similar to the Magness; some maintained that they were identical. But there are slight differences: The Warren is more elongated, can have a richer ground color and red blush, and it is more resistant to fire blight. Also, according to Bell, unpublished analyses of enzymes of the two varieties by scientists at Oregon State University showed that they were very close but differed slightly, results consistent with the theory that they originated from different seeds of the same cross, of the Giant Seckel and the Comice.
MORE:
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November 25, 2011|By David Karp | Special to the Los Angeles Times
Because pear trees take five years or more to come into bearing, growers historically have not been very adventurous in planting new varieties, and so the Warren, with its unofficial provenance, has never made a big splash commercially. Pollination is tricky. Frog Hollow Farm’s Courchesne — who has 9 acres of Warren and half an acre of Magness pears, planted from 1994 to 2003 — has to use a special blower to apply pollen to his flowers to get a decent crop.
But he loves the Warren. “It’s got smooth, grit-free texture and an intense, complex flavor, with hints of guava, pineapple and honey,” he says. After taking their own sweet time coming into bearing, his trees produced a bumper crop this year, and so he looked beyond his usual domains at the San Francisco Ferry Plaza and Berkeley farmers markets, to establish a beachhead in Southern California.
The manager of the Santa Monica markets, Laura Avery, invited Courchesne to sell on Nov. 30 and Dec. 7. He will have Warren, Magness and Golden Russet Bosc pears, for $3.90 a pound, along with high-quality dried Flavor King pluots and Fantasia nectarines, and excellent jams made by his wife, Becky. The Warrens are also available at Farmshop, at the Brentwood Country Mart in Santa Monica, and through December by mail order: six fruits, about 3 pounds, for $24, plus $12.50 shipping; or 12 fruits for $35, plus $17.50 shipping. They’re great in tarts and pies, and poached.“- http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/25/food/la-fo-market-watch-20111125
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Magness is very good about not getting fireblight here as is warren. We have very high pressure from fireblight but I do spray with copper to reduce bacteria and at times antibiotic.
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I have also had blight problems on Magness. I was shocked when it happened at first given what the descriptions say about FB resistance, but it appears they are just wrong. I still have the variety, none of the fireblight I get on pears is too bad.
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Reviving this thread to see if anyone else can give their 5 best flavored pears.
I have three growing so I cannot give any opinion yet.
Kieffer, Abate Fatel, Duchesse d’Angouleme Pears
Time will tell. They are on their 3th and 4th greening this year.
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bbb
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Well I already answered above but I only gave four so I have an excuse for answering again 
Aurora
Magness
Fondante des Moulins-Lille
Urbaniste
Dana Hovey
Dana Hovey fruited for the first time this year, it really impressed me with its rich flavor.
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It’s time to update my list. I have several more varieties grafted so I’m sure this list will change several times as they start fruiting.
Korean Giant
Harrow Sweet
Red Anjou
Bosc
Orient
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Up in NYS two issues are probably more challenging than in other places. The first is brix and the second is productivity. I haven’t had a really good pear crop for 3 years because of these two things. Harrow Sweet used to be my most reliable cropper of quality pears but the brix hasn’t been there last two seasons and nothing else has cropped well at all.
I don’t really like early pears so although Aurora is a good russet that is big and beautiful on good years it isn’t very useful to me during peak stonefruit season. Doesn’t quite get up optimum sugar like Bosc here. I like pears most that ripen late Sept. into Oct and enjoy eating them most after some storage through fall- with really good cheese.
Seckel is good when it bears, but crops have been light for a couple years in a row. However, when it bears it is always sweet and good. Not a full fledged gourmet pear but very nice.
Sheldon and Dutchess are my most truly gourmet fruit on best years, but best years have not occured recently.
I’ve never eaten a Magness from my own tree and they take forever to fruit on vigorous root stocks- at least a decade in my experience. I cut down my first tree and have been waiting for a graft to fruit since. Quince just isn’t a good option for a rootstock for me, I need more vigor to quickly get trees above the deer browse line.
Bosc gets up full sugar here but is very susceptible to both fireblight and pear psyla. It tends towards biennial bearing in less than optimum sunlight.
E. pear quality seems to suffer more than most fruit from any shade- reduces brix.
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Then you didn’t have a properly ripened Abate Fetel. They are very juicy.
I have had very juicy ones, but they were still bland compared to e.g. Bartlett. Still, they very well could have not been properly ripened. They were popular for awhile here in the markets, I have not seen them as often recently though.
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They grow here and are really an incredible pear. Too bad you had the bosc-like experience. Here they are melting and very large! Come see when you can!
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I’m so glad I keep seeing Korean Giant favored on this site. I picked one up a month or so ago. Looking forward to it!
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Euro:
Abbe Fetel
Harrow Sweet (my HS has consistently been excellent)
Comice
Magness
Fondante de Mouline-Liile
Asian:
Korean Giant
Hosui
Shinseiki
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I’m glad this thread resurfaced, because my shy Warren tree finally stopped being a wallflower and hit the dance floor with a vengeance in 2020. In fact, pears had their best year ever in my orchard. We ate them from mid-September until January.
Bartlett has been dependable for years here and is always good to very good. Nye Russet Bartlett delivered its first decent crop from a 4-5 year old graft on the Bartlett tree and was even better than Bartlett, delivering a couple more Brix, more acid and just enough tannins from the skin to be a positive.
Comice has cropped a bit for several years, but only a few fruits on a big, healthy ~13 year old espalier. Last year it gave me a couple of bushels of sweet, juicy, appealingly scented pears. The Taylor’s Gold (russeted sport of Comice) I grafted in 2017 and trained as the top tier on this espalier delivered 15-20 large fruits. Those fruits had a bit more russet than regular Comice, but it wasn’t remarkably more, nor was the taste much different, possibly a slight improvement, but I wouldn’t swear to it. The biggest difference is that Taylor’s Gold began rotting in refrigerated storage several weeks earlier than Comice, so I lost a number of them when I failed to notice this. It will be interesting to see how these compare across multiple fruitings.
Seckel is also a regular bearer for me, and produced a large crop. I probably should have planned a small batch of perry with Bartlett and Seckel (no fruiting perry pears yet) because a decent number of each ended up back in the compost pile after we failed to eat, process and give enough of them away before they rotted. Seckel has a nice amount of tannin in my orchard, so I expect they’ll make a nice perry.
I had a dozen or so Suij (a winter pear from Washington state). The best were quite nice in December, but it was inconsistent from fruit to fruit.
Belle Lucrative delivered its first crop last year, a decent number on a small tree that has struggled since I transplanted it in 2017 from another spot in my orchard. It was treacly with undesirably dense flesh and small fruits and I didn’t like it. It’s probably not fair to judge the variety on this crop given the circumstances.
Warren! Finally! The crop was large, too large, if you consider the fairly small size of the fruit. But oh, was it heavenly to eat, easily the best pears I’ve ever eaten: sweet, acidulous, juicy, aromatic excellence. And it kept under refrigeration through December. I ate the last few fruits sometime in January, and while several were not close to their best, most of those late keepers were still almost as good as they were in November. Worth the wait.
In order of best to least best:
Warren
Comice/Nye Russet Bartlett (so different from each other). (Taylor’s Gold was almost indistinguishable from Comice in its first cropping, so not separated here)
Bartlett
Seckel
Suij
Belle Lucrative
If I based this on consistency and productivity:
Bartlett
Seckel
Comice
Nye Russet Bartlett
Warren
Suij
Belle Lucrative
I have more than a dozen other pear varieties that haven’t fruited yet, so this list will undoubtedly change. I can’t, however, imagine a pear that could taste better than Warren. I just hope it’s consistent in production and flavor going forward.
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My favorites at the moment are
Small yellow pear
Warren
Drippin honey
Clapps favorite
Harrow sweet
That will change by next year again i’m sure. Magness and warren taste identical to me. If your looking for heavy bearing trees these sibling pears are not them.
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How fire blight resistant is the red blushing bartlett pear?
tHANKS!
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Red blushing Bartlett wound up being ayers and it is very resistant to fireblight.
Is your Magness pear on Quince rootstock? If so, could this explain the fire blight problem?
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