Pears on the Move

The floor of the woods around Dog's Plot is covered with Pear blossom petals,  Pears are non- native invasive opportunists in abandoned farmland such as ours....was.  We owe the Pears to Jesuit Missionaries who traveled with their gardens, and  came here a couple of hundred years before the British, by  way of Canada and set up missions near here.  By  the time the American Revolutionaries  burnt down the Cayuga Village in Aurora and cut down their orchards, the Cayuga were living  in wood-frame houses, just like the colonists, many of them practicing Catholics of a sort, and, in addition to their own Corn, Squash, and Beans, were growing many European crops, including Pears and Apples, neither of which are native, and maybe Broccoli for all we know .....but conspicuously, blessedly now, Pears.  A great virtue of the Pear tree is that when you cut it down it sprouts form the stump and roots, matures, and goes to seed.  The naturalized trees vary as seedling trees do, and they would mostly make a good Perry Wine or Brandy, but I graft cultivated types onto the saplings that come up on Dog's Plot.