How We Turned the Bradford Pear into a Monster

[rynling]

Scientists thought they had created the perfect tree. But it became a nightmare.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/how-we-turned-the-bradford-pear-into-a-monster/2018/09/14/f29c8f68-91b6-11e8-b769-e3fff17f0689_story.html

I sat down with the current arboretum director, Richard T. Olsen, and asked him to explain how Creech could have gotten the Bradford pear so wrong. Olsen says you can’t judge what happened without understanding the historical context. The mission of scientists like Creech and Fairchild was to find and manipulate plants in a way that solved a problem, met an unmet need or simply offered an attractive new plant for the American nursery industry and consumers.

Olsen recites Thomas Jefferson’s line: “The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.”

For Creech and his peers working in the 1950s, the potential environmental effects were not part of the decision-making.
 

A bit later on...

"Without thinking much about it, we have globalized our environment in much the same way we have globalized our economy,” Del Tredici has written. He lives in the Boston suburb of Watertown, where he is seeing the first wave of callery pear invasion, young plants “in highly disturbed habitats where no maintenance has occurred,” he told me.
 

You wouldn't think an article about a pear tree would be a huge world-spanning adventure, but you would be wrong; this story is intense.