Callery pear is also great in drought and flooding!
I think most large and seedling tires are pretty good in draught.
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This is a great study, runs 11 years and found 70% of the pears on winter banana survived on m26. The list of Rosacea is the opening, apple / pear / serviceberry / hawthorn / mountain ash, I’ve been trying out graft combinations with all of these for a few years mostly onto wild saskatoon/serviceberry rootstocks, I have lots of them around our place and often when they get tall they’re not productive for fruit, so I’ll cut them off and top work them. I find that all of these species will grow on saskatoon roots, and going into year 4 with pears and 3 with apples, I’m wondering if the intergeneric compatibility will follow some curve like this study saw. This anecdote about winter banana (and I’ve heard palmetta apple, which is more cold hardy) having some pear-apple compatibility is what got me to try apple on amelanchier alnifolia/serviceberry, since it’s well established to work for pears. Turns out you can also grow apples on it, at least so far. I actually expected it not to work, I was trying to find the ‘winter banana’ for amelanchier to apple, but so far out of the couple dozen apple cultivars they’re all growing fine on my test stand, a few more vigorous than others. Maybe if one stands out and actually survives ten years like in this trial it could serve as an interstem.
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With the regional variations in Amelanchier, I’m curious if their compatibility with apple & pear is widespread or specific to certain genotypes. I am gonna make myself a note to attempt putting some pear grafts on ‘Northline’ (a Canadian selection of A. alnifolia) since I have a good supply of them.
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@JohannsGarden You have a good point, it’s possible that the wild stand around here works better as an apple rootstock, I know we have A. alnifolia and the fruit is excellent, but we only have a big crop every few years depending on the spring weather. There have been years where the trees were just loaded with purple fruit and I could pick it by the gallon, usually most productive on smaller bushy growth. The ones I graft over are often 1-2" caliper with sparse growth at the top, so if we wanted a fruit crop they would need renewal pruning anyway. The wild ones are smaller than what I’ve seen at u-picks which can get to the size of a large blueberry. Smokey for sure has some pear compatibility.
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Do the serviceberry rootstocks have any dwarfing effect on either apples or pears (from what you can tell so far anyway)? Are any of the grafts bearing yet?
Nice, I have ‘Smokey’ too (but not yet in quantity), so that’ll be something I can work with in case ‘Northline’ isn’t receptive.
Northline is reputed to sucker heavily, so you can probably get a bunch of easy divisions from it. My Northline seedling sent up two or three in its first year.
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For sure they’re dwarfing, they should stay the size of a shrub, but I’m also out pruning regularly for scion wood. Pears seem to want to outgrow the stock, the union is fine but they just get wider so I try and graft onto established stocks, if you put pear on a one year whip it might fall over without a stake. Some of my pears were full of spurs last fall so hoping for fruit coming up. You can also grow pear on cotoneaster as well as another dwarf stock, I’m going to graft a batch of them this spring.
Btw so not to derail the topic of this thread, I’ve started a few stoolbeds and have found that not all apples want to root readily, but I haven’t given up and often think it would be cool to have some cultivars on their own roots. Has anyone tried stooling winter banana? The other way to get it to root would be by root grafting, I’ve done quite a few of those and supposedly after some time the scion can root, it used to be considered a good thing when root grafting circa early 1900s… but in my attempts while root grafting apples has a good take and the trees did well, I haven’t seen any rooting come from the scion after, the wood seems too mature. Funny enough one reference suggested using pear as a nurse root, because they would eventually give out and the apple scion could then root. Anyone ever experiment with this? If someone is going to try stooling winter banana, I might recommend to try some girdling or even a little IBA before hilling them up.
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I’m sure I read about putting a zip tie around the top of the root where it is grafted and burying the graft along with the chosen scion variety below the soil line. The idea is, as the rootstock grows in girth the zip tie eventually strangles it out. Hopefully that doesn’t happen until the named variety has time to establish it’s own root system to survive on.
I have no personal experience with this method, but it does sound like it could work. 
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I did try establishing a stool of ‘Winter Banana’ around when I started this thread. I used a young tree grafted onto M-26 and then planted it sideways to put a fair amount of the ‘Winter Banana’ stem below ground without actually putting it super deep. It never broke dormancy and just died. The renewed conversation is inspiring me to try again. However, I should probably pick a tree that has already broken dormancy before planting it sideways to make a stool.
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Bramley’s seedling apparently roots vigorously at room temp if hardwood cuttings are taken immediately after leaf drop. I’m very interested in an insanely vigorous triploid with at least fairly good FB resistance and high quality fruits
However, I don’t think it’s hardy to your location
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@JohannsGarden I’ve done stoolbeds both ways, by trench layering / horizontal like you’re suggesting, and also the vertical method / mound layering where you just plant it the usual way and cut it off in the spring. The first method seems like it should work better because you have more material in the ground, but I found the second one produces just as many shoots and it’s easier to manage. I have a b118 stoolbed and in it’s second year I mounded up the shoots with wood shavings real early, and covered the growing tips on some of the shorter ones, thinking they would push through. Don’t do that, those shoots stopped growing. Maybe that was what you got with your first attempt. Now I let the shoots get 6-8" tall then start hilling them up, you want to do it early while the wood is still juvenile. The only thing I’m adding this year is drip tape, I have some composted sawdust/shavings to use it can take a tonne of water to keep it damp when it’s hot out.
@Phlogopite that’s interesting, I’ve heard of a few crab apples that can root from hardwood. Bramley is zone 4 or 5 I think
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I had left all the shoot tips uncovered. The main reason I planted sideways was that the ‘Winter Banana’ was not on its own roots, and I wanted to make sure the rootstock was off to the side of where the WB was so that if the rootstock pushed up suckers, they would be easy to distinguish from WB shoots since they would be to the side instead of the same spot.
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