Over the past year, I seem to be unable to keep my eyes on the road in front of me. While I’m driving around for work or taking family to OHSU in Portland, I often see a tree in a ditch that is festooned with golden yellow or red orbs and I make a mental note of it if the tree looks healthy so I can go back and take pictures or pick fruit or cut scions later. I thought it might be fun to list the locations of some of these trees in case anyone else driving by is also tempted to stop.
There’s a huge apple tree ( I think) about 75 yards from the now hiring signs on the northbound side of I5 heading towards Woodburn.
There’s also a very tall tree with golden yellow orbs underneath a bridge on I5 and Del Rio Road. There is a little room to pull off there or if the traffic‘s not bad so I might brave that one.
There are a whole bunch of feral looking apple trees on Metz Hill Rd., west of Oakland, Oregon. I think originally someone had planted some golden delicious in a field there, and the rest are seedlings. The seedling closest has very small apples with a blush unlike the presumed golden delicious tree. However, this crab near the gold delicious has the same deep pleated calyx as the golden delicious.
Correction: There isn’t a fruit tree under the Del Rio bridge. It’s half a mile south under the bridge over the Umpqua River, north of Roseburg, heading North. Probably easier to get to it from a boat ramp or park on Hwy 99.
They are predominantly round like Asian pears and they have a crunch. There’s not a lot of flavor, but the texture on these is fine. I have eaten other pears that look like this from ditch trees that have had a sandy gritty awful texture but these are pretty good and they’re obviously getting no care whatsoever in a ditch near a logging yard.
There are I’m guessing several acres of pear trees here that must’ve been planted long ago. They are 20 to 30 feet tall. There are a few that look like those round not great pairs and there are a few that are more classic pear shaped. I was supposed to be driving to a client and I didn’t wanna crawl in a ditch full of blackberries so the only one I got close to is the yellow slightly russeted one above. I tasted it. It looks like a shorter version of my own russeted pear, but the neck isn’t as long and it’s not as juicy. There are larger, very golden pears here, too, but I didn’t try any. A few hawthorns are mixed in, probably not planted since they’re native here. I think I saw a couple apples, but they weren’t accessible.
Ha, I do the same thing. Once you start growing fruit trees you can’t drive past a hedgerow without clocking every apple and plum. There’s a spot near me with a few old Cox types growing completely wild that I keep meaning to go back to with a bag and some secateurs.
I like taking those roadside finds and grafting them to my trees, if I like them enough. I would suggest securing cuttings as soon as possible because you really never know how long any given tree will last. Since I moved into this town 3 years ago, I noticed a row of apple trees extending the entire road just a few miles from me. Never got around to tasting the fruit, was going to once they were ripe this year. Well I dawdled too long it seems because on the left side of the road, the state sprayed weed killer on them all. On the right side, nature did it for them. We had a tornado touch down and it completely destroyed the entire line of trees with eerie precision, then went on to take out a cabin and a substantial amount of a path of forested trees.
All this to say, never hurts to get cuttings sooner than later. Those were all very mature trees but they were all quite small apples, likely just crabapples (or so I’ll tell myself so I don’t think on it too much).
I did an internet search and Sutherlin was an enormous ranch where the owner drained marshland and carved it up into 5-10 acre plots. They specifically advertised it as orchard land. Most of the trees were apples. The town went bust in 1910 and according to the internet none of the trees remain. Maybe to a normal person who doesn’t see fruit everywhere! I can see why land with a high water table might not grow great apples, but clearly pears like it. (There’s still standing water all around in the winter when just a few miles further north it’s no longer visible). Oakland, slightly to the north, was a turkey town- marketed as the best place to raise turkeys. That town went bust during the Great Depression. I have only found one feral pear so far around Oakland, near the Rochester Bridge, and it was terribbly gritty. Also very small, smaller than the roundish fruit I photographed. I have found many feral apples near Oakland. There are also a bunch in the Wilcox and Coles Rd area, but I haven’t sampled them.
My husband was a little weirded out by my desire to make a couple U-turns using exits in order to pull off a major busy highway to look at a tree. We were on the way to a hospital for him to have a procedure that was making him nervous, so he was right and I didn’t stop.
I am starting to suspect that the really huge trees, both tall and wide, are all pears. I have seen a few scraggly seedling apple trees, and the ones that form thickets, but they haven’t looked so majestic. I am still searching, though.
Want to check out Mt Pisgah arboretum, which has some yellow thicket forming crabs they are labeling as Pacific/Western/Oregon crab. They also have the ones labeled the same that look like the rootstock some of us buy. Their fruits are grape shaped and red.
A huge Callery pear tree with huge fruit! (Mentioned on this forum before)
It taste like an Asian pear with tons of astringency, Between an unripe persimmon and pomegranate juice.
Do they ever turn golden? That’s the same size and shape as some I have found that seem like they might make good perry or an addition to cider, but not pleasant to eat after the first bite.
last year i was visiting an old neighbor in alsea Oregon. along rte 34, past alsea town proper, before reaching mussouri bend in the alsea River, on the right hand side there is a graveyard up a small “road” (more like a gravel turnaround). it is before you get to the old church on that right hand side.
up there i found 6 to 10 apple trees, all were fully ripe in mid October or over ripe slightly. all were good eating in hand but one which was obviously a cider apple. half were yellow with a blush, the others red, some russeting.i did not get photos, but picked a car load to eat on the trip.
if anyone wants gps spot or these are not known to anyone else message me.
the church, turnaround near it, etc are all private property but the cemetery and roadside where these trees are, is public, so, easily access for picking. they were feral or no longer maintained and i do not know how old but they were not young trees at all
My mom and her family used to live there! The town flooded pretty regularly so they moved further inland. Beautiful area. They put all the houses on stilts. I have never been to the cemetery but imagine it was uphill.
My one friend traveled somewhere and saw a stall with very large Avo’s. He stopped and asked how they got them so big, the size around a football size. Massive.
Oh said the guy, we just started watering them this year. And probably fed them too.
So in my opinion the roadside fruit trees are probably just surviving, and fruit size and quality can be determined by available resources for the tree.
Yes, and I figure some of them would taste a lot better under better conditions. I am noticing a lot of the pears I am finding look the same, both the little golden round ones and the larger bells. Maybe the Sutherlin/ Riddle pears are a specific variety, and the two bad textured pears are a rootstock. Of the suspected goldens, I think I found a planted tree and a seedling, due to both consistent size and color differences. I have not looked at the other trees on the same road. Those fruit that are REALLY numerous on the trees we can confirm might be bigger if thinned, too, like the Riddle tree.
It would be a fun discovery if the Sutherlin bells were the same as my unidentified russeted stem/calyx pear, just not as big or delicious due to lack of summer watering and less competition, but I don’t know.
The emblem of the dental clinic I go to a sihouette of a fruit tree with a child picking a fruit from it. Get it, to enjoy a crisp apple, you need to visit this clinic for regular dental checkups.
Every time I see it, my reaction is how I would prune this tree differently.
my cabin was above the church up a little path, up the hill. it was a great place to live! and yes i was flooded then it froze and we had deep snow, ice and flooding all in a week, i just sat around reading.
That Callery pear find sounds worth experimenting with. The astringency usually mellows quite a bit with storage, especially if you let them blet a little. Might be worth taking a scion and grafting onto something just to see how it develops when properly grown out.
