Looks like those of us who have tried and failed to root pears using cuttings have been going about it wrong. My attempts (and those from other’s I’ve read accounts from) have been with hardwood cuttings which often callous and look promising for a while, but ultimately fail to root and then die. Apparently, we should be using summer softwood cuttings instead of dormant hardwood cuttings!
Here’s a report from Australia (important to note when considering December is summer there and August is winter):
Thats very true. Its well known that many trees respond much better if soft wood rooted as apposed to hard wood attempts. Ive had much better luck with Peach and Buckthorn doing them this way. Its much more trouble of course, the rooting environment is critical since you have active, growing tissue.
That article is pretty funny though. They act like they discovered a new root stock. One can root any pear. Thats not the object of finding a good root stock. A worthwhile root stock is one that is compatible with many if not all pears, is easy to propagate itself, preferably by stooling and one that imparts certain desired qualities into the scion like dwarfing, disease reistance, etc.
I didn’t get any impression from the article that they were touting a new rootstock. Rather that they didn’t need to use a rootstock at all since the cultivars they rooted grew and produced well on their own roots. The point they were touting was that it was far cheaper to produce the pears on their own roots as opposed to grafting them with no loss in productivity or quality as a result.
I went to the book shelf and dusted off the Reference Manual Of Woody Plant Propagation, which isnt super up to date but the science doesn’t change. For P. communis varieties it mentions poor results, 47%, with hardwood cuttings but excellent results with softwood cuttings, 80% on Bartlett, 98% with Old Home.
This using a dip in IBA and then the mist treatment.
I’m sure you could experiment with using this on any pear.
In the study they were not growing them as full size trees. If I understood correctly they were trained into a “V” shape on trellis and managed with pruning just like their comparison trees which were grafted.