I moved my leona pear to a new position on the Ayers pear I grafted it to this spring . Hopefully this will develop into a long lived scaffold of Leona pears.
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Leona is now around 20 + feet tall. Check on it once or twice a year but mostly just leave it alone to keep with the autumn olives. Nitrogen fixers like that tend to benefit everything around them which partially explains Leonas rapid growth. Soon i will taste this pear and the world will know much more about this pear and others.
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Leona has fruit buds this year. This infamously slow to fruit pear actually just took four years to produce fruit buds! Remember i cheated and had grown a callery 2 years on its own roots and grafted leona leaving as much trunk as possible to account for rabbits and fireblight problems that might come up.
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We hit 20 recently but this southern pear is not jumping the gun blooming. Its keeping time with other pears making me believe it may work much further north!
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Sweet Sweet Leona your going to be perfect for Kansas. Sometimes we know we got to take risks. Leona is way out there in uncharted territory but for those of you in the North and in the central United States someone needed to bite the bullet and test this one. Leona is just now getting ready to bloom with other pears in April. 4 years since i grafted it to blooms. Leona is rare even in the south mostly because of its reportedly long amount of time to produce pears.
Its a very fast grower reaching at least 25 feet tall now most of which is straight up. Its a pear like none ive grown before because of its obvious desire to grow tall and fast. This can be partly contributed to the fact im growing it between two autum olives. I suspect im the first one outside the south to ever grow this pear. There are half a dozen flower clusters. The rumors of delayed fruiting were greatly exaggerated. Like most of my pears its done great on callery.
According to ars grin as noted with a link above “Originated in Converse, Louisiana about 1930. Legend has it that this was an unclaimed, mail order tree planted by a postal worker and named for his wife. It has been widely propagated in Louisiana and Texas and we all agree that it is a very sweet, high quality, dessert pear. The large, apple shaped fruit has a distinct ‘shoulder’. It takes a few years to come into full bearing on calleryana. Probably about 400 - 450 chill units. – E. Natelson.”
The fruit according to ars grin looks like these below (not my photos)
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I have Leona grafted into several other trees. Clark, did you get yours from me? I can’t remember. Like Kiefer it’s a sand pear hybrid, but it’s a very early blooming in comparison to Kiefer. It’s also a semisoft pear and very similar to Baldwin.
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Kieffer is an early bloomer here, so that must be very early!
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Leona blooms with kieffer here. I got it from the usda I didn’t know you had it at the time or I would have hit you up. It’s about 30 feet tall now. Hard to believe it was grafted in 2016. It’s nearly straight up. I need to prune the autumn olives off of it.
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It’s an aggressive grower in the tree it’s in. But it’s taking its sweet time to bloom. The one in Baldwin acts just like Baldwin. All said, I’m not sure whether the person who sent me the scion got the label mixed up with something else. I was a FB friend with the person who originally found Leona. The fruit on the graft on the Baldwin tree did not look like his. By the way, the person who originally found Leona was Travis Callahan who died a couple of years ago. He also found Southern Bartlett and gave the scion to Just Fruits and Exotics. Travis eventually came to the conclusion that Leona was actually a Louisiana Beauty Pear which had been around for a while. Anyway, that’s a little bit of historical background to go with the pear.
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Keefer is one of the very late bloomers here in SE Georgia.
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Leona is an interesting pear very different from many I grow. Charles Harris has flowers this year as well. Cold may get them lets see what happens.
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I hope they make it past the cold. That’s the problem with the early bloomers. Thanks.
Marcus Toole
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Did you get to taste Leona this year? 
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No I didn’t yet.
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Did you get any pears off of Charles Harris?
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Just 1 and it’s not a fair sampling yet. Seems I might have had an inferior Leona at one point as well. When I get a small first year woody pear that’s not really fair to count that. If it’s 3 or more pears and second or third year I’m going to have a better idea of what it is then. Almost all 1st year fruit I would rate poorly. Leona is getting choked by an autumn berry i need to get off of it.
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Rising Star might be a variety I am interested in, don’t know much about it, just like the article about this pear. Would like to know more about it.
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Leona did not set fruit this year but it’s my fault I left autumn olives to encroach on it. Did prune those off of it now but it stunted the tree making it tall and skinny instead of full of fruit.
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Leona is heavy with blossoms this year. The blooms are all in the top of the tree about 25 feet off the ground so i had to zoom in to take some photos. It will overlap other early blooming pears like ts hardy, douglas , kieffer, improved kieffer , Duchess D’ Angoulme , ya li, pai li etc. First i will find out if i like the flavor and go from there. Seems it produced a pear or two once but i didn’t make notes on first year pears. Don’t recall anything about them. The tree is a mess since it was growing in a wind break of autumn olives. Grafted this tree 7 years ago as shown above. Leona is a very rare southern pear. These are the types of pears i grow to determine if it will grow outside Texas. My suspicion is it wont have any problems. Many people suggested it would bloom to early but as you can see it appears ok. We wont know for sure until we are eating the type of quality pears many described as leona in Texas. It has bloomed many times. Today is march 28th 2023. Leona should overlap Charles Harris as well.
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