The symptoms of pear-blight are so characteristic that the disease
cannot be confounded with any other malady or condition of the
tree. It appears earliest in the season on the blossoms causing
blossom-blight. Attacked by blight, the blossoms wilt, and after the
petals fall, fruit and spur show the characteristic blackening of the
disease. Blossom-blight may escape the attention of the pear-grower,
but twig-blight, a succeeding form of the disease, can escape no
one who has the sense of sight. No other disease of the pear brings
on such palpable destruction to the tree as twig-blight. No other
disease causes such comfortless despair to the grower. Twig, branch,
or tree, as the case may be, in all affected parts, turns black, the
leaves droop, seeming to show the effects of fire. A marked symptom
is, if there can be doubt of those given, that the blackened foliage
clings most tenaciously to the dead branches. Twig-blight is the
most common manifestation of the disease. Another form of the blight
appears as a canker on the trunk and large branches--canker-blight or
body-blight. These cankers are dark, smooth, and sunken, with definite
margins marked by a crevasse in the winter; but as spring comes on
the advancing margins become raised and more or less indefinite.
Occasionally an opaque liquid oozes from lenticels newly attacked. On
branches, the cankers usually surround a smaller offshoot, sucker, or
spur. The disease spreads with great rapidity, by reason of which it is
easily told from winter-killing. Injury from cold is also more general,
and the foliage browns rather than blackens.
Pear-blight is an American disease, the history of which was briefly
given on page 51. Until recently it was confined to regions east of the
Rocky Mountains, but since about 1900 it has been a virulent epidemic
on the Pacific slope as well, and is now found from coast to coast
wherever pears are grown in North America. It seems not to be found in
the pear regions of other continents. It attacks the apple, quince,
and other pomes as well as the pear, and plant pathologists declare it
to be the most destructive disease attacking the pome-fruits. Trees in
the nursery suffer as well as those in the orchard. Every variety of
the pear bearing edible fruit is attacked. Fortunately, some sorts are
more immune than others. Kieffer, Seckel, Winter Nelis, and Duchesse
d'Angoulême are most resistant of standard varieties, while Bartlett,
Clapp Favorite, and Flemish Beauty are little resistant.
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