My grandma had a pear tree in her backyard that was about 25-30 feet tall and had tiny (~2"), sweet, soft, yellow fruit with thin skin and ripened in July/August (zone 8). She was from Mexico and called them perrita de San Juan. However, the pear was already established in the yard before 1940, when my grandparents moved in. It became diseased and was cut down 10 or 15 years ago. I’ve been back to the house to see if there were any suckers coming up but no luck.
If anybody has ideas of what variety this might be or where I could find more information, please let me know. Thanks.
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I have a theory where it came from was either a seedling or maybe this was the one https://gilroydispatch.com/2013/05/02/a-tree-grows-in-san-juan/
Many trees existed at one time and died off one at a time from blight according to the article. It may have been a sucker from an ungrafted tree. Someone planted all those pears a couple hundred years ago but that story is lost to time. Perhaps this was perrita de San Juan since
Perillas De San Juan is pretty close as is the description you gave.
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Thank you for the information. Those look the same size and color but are much more rounded. The ones I remember were classic pear-shaped. The article reports San Juan pears as being winter pears and I know my grandmas ripened just after the early raspberries finished up. The differences could be natural variation. Great story regardless.
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Adding the location may help with identifying the pear.
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If you go to this page
https://www.ars-grin.gov/ars/PacWest/Corvallis/ncgr/pony.html
you can find many pictures of pears popular in the early 20th century in the US. Its probably in that list. The Pears of New York is a book which is also on-line, you can see if it has the right harvest time or not from the book.
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