A Tree That Was Once the Suburban Ideal Has Morphed Into an Unstoppable Villain

The Bradford pear, hugely popular when suburbs were developed, contributed to an invasion of trees conquering nearly anywhere it lands. South Carolina is stepping up its fight against it.

CLEMSON, S.C. — In the distance, beside a brick house in a tidy subdivision, the trees rose above a wooden fence, showing off all that had made the Bradford pear so alluring: They were towering and robust and, in the early spring, had white flowers that turned their limbs into perfect clouds of cotton.

But when David Coyle, a professor of forest health at Clemson University, pulled over in his pickup, he could see the monster those trees had spawned: a forbidding jungle that had consumed an open lot nearby, where the same white flowers were blooming uncontrollably in a thicket of tangled branches studded with thorns.

“When this tree gets growing somewhere, it does not take long to take over the whole thing,” Professor Coyle, an invasive species expert, said. “It just wipes everything out underneath it.”