Well, I’ll be buggered!
Our pear tree has, in the last couple of hours -yes, couple of hours!- brought forth some very pretty white flowers!
What goes?
I’ve sent the pickies to gerard hoping he’ll get them and post them here as proof that I’m not drunk or hallucinating or anything so, perhaps when he can get a chance he can post them up.
We are perplexed here!
Very pretty though.
I don’t think it’s all that uncommon; our grapefruit bush is doing the same right now. After the good rain we had, it’s flowering profusely , and at the same it’s bearing a lot of fruit…
It is in the courtyard where all the plants get a good watering at all times; it seems to me that only the rain manages to bring this out of season flowering.
Your pears look good!
New life comes down in rain… and thunderstorms are apparantly good for fixing nitrogen.
There is something magical in that rain that works wonders. Even the plants that are regularly watered, only truly blossom after the rains….
Hold on, it’s Melbourne, right? 4 seasons in one day. So there’s probably a branch with no leaves on it, and a branch where the leaves are looking a bit brown, neither of which you would choose to highlight of course!
Thank you all!
We are very puzzled here!
I’ll be taking the photos to our nursery during the week. Check what they think but they’ll probably agree with Katerina the Great; that there’s lots of work being done while the eyelids are shut. Come to think of it, it’s pretty much how I get my best work done… then I wake up and it’s all gone!
Just gave all the green creatures a good soaking in preparation of the scorcher we’re all expecting today.
I felt quite the classical scholar last night.
One of the emails had asked me for the reference to a tragedian’s quote and I went straight to it! I nudged Mrs At with grins and smirks and she said, “all right, all right, I’ll make you some more kourabiethes!”
I’m a very happy boy today!
I would have asked if you had just had a big rain after an unusually dry summer. After the shocking summer in Adelaide last year many plants repeated their Spring blooming in the first decent rain, sometime late in summer. But then, I don’t know anything about pear trees, but you must have kept some water up to it for the fruit to look that good?
It’s because all the people died in Haiti Atomou – earth has some more spare capacity for life.
Do you know what I learnt 2 days ago? What? That even though dry seeds may seem dormant, sleeping, not doing much, the DNA is churning out transcripts. It’s alive and working, putting out ‘don’t germinate yet’ proteins because the right signals haven’t come. Seeds are as alive as ideas.
Epigenetics is a wonderful thing!
Lovely notion Madness. For every person that falls a flower blooms. If only it were true.
Oh no Warrigal, it is true. I’ve done the numbers. There’s a lot of rain if you cut down a lot of trees. Massive influx of population without cutting down trees leads to drought. I’m going to write this up one day.
Well, I’m not going to post here if I have to wait for moderation
Bloody atomou, it’s his fault
Is that a partridge I spy?
With squinted eyes and enhanced fructosity, bought about by the fragrance of the flowers and the inhalation of the fermenting older fruit’s musk, I can just see Simcard lurking in the bower.
Methinks that he is out to pinch anyone with ouzo on his breath.
Beware GT.
Are you sure?
That is interesting. Let’s look into that. I’ll get back to you.
Apparently this season and last season saw a great many fruit trees somewhat confused about the right time to blossom. A mate in Orange who grows heritage apples got two flushes last year and again this year.
I haven’t been able to find what actually triggers blossoming in pears but it’s almost certainly similar to apples which blossom after the rising spring temps warm the ground sufficiently for a particular reaction to occur in the roots, the product of which is pumped up to the boughs where it initiates blossoming and subsequently fruiting. If you get a number of abnormally warm days after a relatively cooler spell it can re-initiate, provided the nutrient levels in the soil are correct. Flowering and fruiting of course take prodigious amounts of nutrients and energy.
The other possibility my mate told me of is that the tree may in fact be stressed and the blossoming is a reaction to that. It’s common for flowering plants of all types to respond to significant stress by flowering abnormally. It’s a species survival mechanism. The plant experiencing stress chemo-mechanically thinks, “I’m maybe for the high jump. Better flower to get my genetics out there!”
Not a very satisfactory answer I know but that’s all I could find out.