When Nikkilyn Morrison moved into her Old Town condo a decade ago, she didn’t give much thought to the tall, leafy trees that peeked into her fourth-floor view. Today, she wishes she had.
Last month, her neighborhood became a quiet winter illusion. The dozen trees lining her block burst into clusters of white, creamy flowers. Fallen petals covered the entire street like fresh snow. Then, the smell of rotten fish hit.
“I feel like it makes me almost choke, and I have asthma,” said Morrison, who has asked her condo management company about removing the trees. “It kind of makes my lungs seize up too.”
The trees on Morrison’s block are invasive Callery pears, or Bradford pears, which bloom in blizzards across Illinois neighborhoods, roadsides and forests every April.
For decades, Callery pears were prized for their rapid growth and spring blooms, notwithstanding their noxious odor, but in October the state added the tree to its list of regulated invasive species under the Illinois Exotic Weeds Act. The law will ban the planting, selling and distribution of the trees starting in 2028 to give nurseries and planters time to eliminate them from their inventories. But Chicago is inundated with them, and some residents worry it could be years before the trees are removed.
“I think that a lot of places plant them because they don’t get ridiculously big, and they bloom, and people think they’re pretty,” Morrison said. “I feel like without this restriction, I don’t know that people would actually stop planting them, so I’m grateful for that. I would like to see them replaced with different trees at a certain point.”
Because of how quickly Callery pears spread, it’s hard to pin down the total number of them in Illinois, said Ryan Pankau, a horticulture educator with the University of Illinois. Other states, including Ohio, Pennsylvania and South Carolina, have already banned the sales of the trees. In Missouri, officials organized a Callery pear buyback program in April, inviting residents to cut down their Callery pears and receive a native tree for free.
Pankau said he’s seen Callery pears increasingly invade prairies and other natural areas that are undergoing restoration in Illinois.
“That’s where we are seeing Callery pears really aggressively invade those spots, because they aren’t mowed, they may be burned, and that can help in a prairie restoration, but the cost of controlling it is just ever increasing as this plant continues to spread and pop up in areas around the state,” Pankau said.
While originally thought to be sterile, Callery pears, native to Asia, became popular among landscapers and spread rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s, according to Sean Zieche, the district manager of the Lombard office of Davey Tree, a professional tree service company. It was later discovered that Callery pears could cross-pollinate with other trees in the wild, driving their meteoric spread, Zieche said.
“Now you have all these invasive trees that are just growing along the highway, and, you know, essentially it’s just taking over,” Zieche said. “Their rootstock is extremely strong, and what they do is they just pretty much come in and overcrowd our native trees that are already there, and they kill them out.”
The tree branches are also weakly attached to the trunks and prone to splitting apart during storms and harsh weather events, Zieche said. In the late summer and fall, Callery pears produce small brown fruit, which birds and squirrels collect and disperse.
Zieche said he commonly sees the seeds dropped next to fences, where they will grow up and wrap around the fence.
“Within two to three years, that tree is going to be 10 to 15 feet tall, and it’ll start absorbing and damaging your fence,” Zieche said.
The minimum charge for Zieche’s office to send a tree removal crew is $400, he said. If it’s a smaller Callery pear, his team can lower the removal fee to around $75.
Patrick Reynolds, who lives in the Irving Park neighborhood, had a Callery pear tree in his backyard for 30 years until he removed it in 2021.
“It was a gorgeous tree. My father had one in Lombard, and it flowers beautifully in the spring, and then in the fall, it had this bronze of gold and really gorgeous color,” said Reynolds, who’s now retired but worked about 40 years as a packaging journalist. “It is tall and cylindrical and would give us some shade and nice color, so we had to put it in.”
Before he had the tree removed, Reynolds said his wife laid out a few pavement tiles around the tree to create a patio deck in the backyard. But in a few months, they noticed big cracks in the tree, which made them concerned about its stability. They replaced the Callery pear with a large umbrella.
Adam Musto said he first noticed the “pretty white flowering tree” on the street where he used to live in Wrigleyville. He snapped a picture of it and posted the photo in a Facebook environmental group, asking what it was. He soon learned it was an invasive Callery pear.
“I was thinking, like, OK, maybe I can just get rid of this one,” said Musto, who works as a programming researcher at NFL Network. “But especially when they’re blooming, it’s almost like a horror movie scene. Once you see one, you’re like, ‘Oh my God.’ It feels like they’re everywhere. On our street in Chicago, there’s probably two in our parkways, and then kind of all down Irving Park.”
He has since shared information and photos about the trees on Facebook to educate others and asked city officials about their plans for the trees.
UIC researchers use mural art to raise awareness of invasive plant species
“Anytime someone learns about an invasive plant, there’s this instinct — for me, I was like, oh, I would love to figure out a way to fight this, or talk to neighbors and see if we can replace them or reach out to our alderman’s office,” said Musto, who now lives in Glenview. “But then you just see them, and they’re literally ubiquitous. And it’s not as easy as, oh, I can just dedicate a Saturday during a community volunteer day. These are really everywhere, right?”
Ryan Gage, a spokesperson with the Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation, said in a statement that the city will not be requiring the removal of Callery pears.
“While the ornamental pear tree can no longer be sold or planted in Illinois, it has not demonstrated the ability to be invasive on city parkways or in residential yards,” Gage said. “Ornamental pear trees continue contributing to the urban canopy and provide environmental and health benefits for people and wildlife. For this reason, the City will not remove them unless they are dead, diseased, dying, or otherwise structurally compromised, just as we treat our other trees.”
In the meantime, many residents may just be stuck with the trees and their unmistakable foul smell, which is meant to attract pollinators like flies.
Riva Feshbach, a resident of Logan Square, lives just two houses away from a Callery pear in her neighbor’s backyard. Despite living in the same neighborhood for decades, she’s never grown accustomed to the smell, she said.
“Maybe a fish that’s been sitting around in a bucket in the backyard for a while, I’ve had 20 plus years to perfect my description,” Feshbach said. “There are huge lilac bushes in my neighborhood, and they overpower the smell of the lilacs.”
Feshbach said while she’s grateful the species has been ruled invasive by the state, she wishes more could be done.
She suggested the city start a program for removing and replacing Callery pears on public property or consider instituting some kind of incentive program for homeowners to get rid of them.
“I know the city has a hard time keeping up with taking care of trees … but they’re everywhere,” Feshbach said. “They’re very, very pretty trees when they’re in bloom, and they have a nice shape. So I get that, but they’re just awful.”
Jerry Wu is a freelancer.
