I just read an article suggesting the possible trials of Amelanchier (serviceberry) as a hardy, dwarfing rootstock for pear. It suggested that the native serviceberry is hardy to -40F and that it produces a tree roughly half the height of OH&F87. There was no mention of graft compatibility, disease or pest resistance, etc… Has anyone tried this? I have tons of serviceberry growing wild here and could easily appropriate some saplings for use as rootstock or plant some seeds. I’ve never done any grafting, but this might be a perfect opportunity to learn. I search the catalogs for a cold-hardy dwarfing pear rootstock and haven’t found a reliable one yet. Thoughts?
I guess the next obvious question is whether the graft would take easily. I guess I wouldn’t have imagined that you could graft a pear scion onto serviceberry rootstock and have it take. Maybe my gut instinct was accurate, but if so, why the article in a professional fruit magazine?
Haven’t tried it but it wouldn’t surprise me if it worked, at least for a while -therein lies the rub.
It’s one thing to have a graft take and grow, but another to have it behave itself. I’ve had grafts overgrow their rootstock and that’s clumsy at best; sometimes something will take but be stingy in production, and so on.
But pear is grafted to quince pretty reliably. And if you got a small pear that was hardy, and were able to throw in fire blight resistance, you’d have a winner. No reason I can think of that you shouldn’t go ahead and try a few. At worst you’ll cut your fingers a bit learning how to graft!
Interesting thought, amelachier is native here as well, and super hardy. Maybe some of that cold hardiness would be transferred to the pear scion. Might be worth a try, I have lots of pear scion and too many amelanchier in the yard to count.
Yeah, the Serviceberry is easy enough to find for me and I have 7 or 8 varieties of pear now and can probably find some more scion. Cold hardiness hasn’t really been a huge issue for me on OH&F87 (and we routinely get to -20F here), but I would like to have a more dwarfing rootstock and this would be a fun experiment. That said, yeah, it’s always heartrbreaking to me to lose trees in their prime and I’m just a bit concerned that this would work smashingly for a while and then the tree will fall apart. I’ll report when and if I make any experiments with it.
Had a friend in (Alberta, I think) some years back, who was experimenting with Amelanchier as an understock for apples… haven’t seen or heard from him in years… don’t know how that worked out.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained…try some pears on serviceberry and see how it works.
I’ve done some pears on native cockspur hawthorn, C.crus-galli - have one that’s still going OK 15 years out - just saw it yesterday… now a very columnar plant about 8 ft tall, with a decent crop of pears on it. Others were removed to make room for my wife’s tennis court, or they would likely still be alive, I guess.
I grafted pear to 24 Shadblow Serviceberry last spring, 2017. They all took, low vigor in most cases, a couple wanted to take off but were promptly pruned back by deer. It will be interesting to see how they do in their second season of growth. I’m interested to graft some on Hawthorne as well to see how vigor compares to Serviceberry.
I currently have only 1 of 24 of these grafts still surviving. This says more about proper deer protection than compatibility. My last one is Luscious and I’ve been able to prune back the service berry so it’s just the pear growing above the graft. The tree is probably 4-5’ tall and nicely feathered, nice form, has never bloomed. I’ll try to remember to photograph it this spring. Summer Crisp and Pineapple both showed nice vigor on Serviceberry, and probably would have done well with proper protection. Other varieties that successfully grafted to serviceberry are: Clapps, Colette, Honey Sweet and Seckel. I haven’t done any more grafts on serviceberry, but did a bunch of grafts on OHxF97, 87, 333, and Quince in 2018.