20+ years ago, we moved into our house with NO landscaping. We planted a number of trees, one of which was a Bradford Pear right next to our deck. My wife is the horticulturist in the family and I defer all decisions on what to plant and where to her and we've had few problems until now. The tree has grown tremendously and we have pruned it over the years in order to walk under it. It grows fast and provides plenty of shade for our deck. It seemed like the perfect tree for the situation. We have recently lost 2 of our Ash trees to the Emerald Ash borer and she surmised that the Bradford Pear would be the next victim of disease as it's ubiquitous around our area.

Well, 2 wks ago, I came home and found that one large main limb (approx 12" in diameter at the joint) had split off the trunk and roughtly half the tree's foliage was laying in our backyard. It had been windy but not THAT windy. I attributed it to the fact that the limb had exited the trunk at almost 90 deg before turning upward and that the weight was just too much for it. We pruned some of the other "heavy" limbs but we're going to wait until next year to do any more to avoid shocking the tree.

Then, this past weekend, we saw a Bradford Pear at the front of our subdivision do the same thing.

What's going on, I thought. A little Internet search turned up information on a "genetic" defect in the tree that makes its limbs weak and subject to breakage during wind or ice storms. The defect is more in the way the tree grows. Its branches tend to grow up out of the trunk like flower stems out of a vase. It seems that this makes for weak joints. My wife and I both do not recall this information being available some 20 years ago. Evidently, the species was relatively new and there were few specimens in their 20's to provide any hard historical data on the tree. It's been a VERY popular tree for developers and landscapers to plant over the last couple of decades, so the scuttlebut is that there will be lots of these trees "biting the dust" as they age in the coming years.

I believe that if you know about this "defect", it may be possible to prune it as it grows to minimize the potential loss of limbs. We're going to try and save the tree as it DOES provide a lot of shade, but if you are contemplating planting one, forewarned is forearmed.