“Callery pear and its invasiveness is nothing new, so again that’s why the legislature is just catching up to what we’ve known for a while,” Evan Lentz, assistant extension educator at the UConn College of Agriculture, said.
This year, Connecticut is adding six species of plants to its invasive species list based on recommendations from the Invasive Plants Council.
“I think it’s just kind of been maybe people going through a backlog of all these ornamentals and looking at which ones might be a good candidate for invasive status,” Lentz said.
New to the list include porcelain berry, mugwort, quackgrass, Japanese angelica tree, Japanese wisteria and Chinese wisteria. It also includes the callery pear tree.
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“Really nice showy flowers in the springtime, early bloomer. It also has a really nice conical shape as well,” Lentz said.
For the callery pear in particular, the new law states that “no person shall import, move, sell, purchase, transplant, cultivate or distribute …” the plant on or after Oct. 1, 2027.
That law will take effect for the other plants in October 2024.
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“In the case of the callery pear, you have a large number of offspring and then they’re also going to do really well in our environment, so that’s why we’re kind of worried about this tree,” Lentz said.
He said in the native place of a particular species, there is generally a natural level of checks and balances to control population growth.
“That’s what we don’t have in our area so we don’t have those checks and balances a lot of times,” Lentz said.
Victoria Wallace of the Invasive Plants Council, said the delay for enforcing the callery pear is to allow nurseries to make proper adjustments to their inventory.
“People may be upset a little bit or up in arms and you think about the nursery industry like this is a pretty popular tree. There’s plenty of other great species out there, other ornaments that you could put in your yard, other alternatives that are going to give you the same type of impact and aesthetic value that this tree would,” Lentz said.
