After the short days and damp chill of winter, the delicate white blooms of the Bradford pear feel like a promise — a herald of longer, lighter days and rising temperatures. Soon, they seem to whisper, we will all be sitting outside with bare arms at 7 o’clock feeling perfectly comfortable.

But if the Bradford pear, one of spring’s earliest flowering trees, has traditionally been the primary bearer of that news in Richmond, it’s facing an increasing group of people all too eager to shoot the messenger.

The cultivar is one of the most popular forms of a species known as the Callery pear (Pyrus calleryana), a tree first brought to the United States from Asia in the early 1900s to help save the tanking Pacific Coast pear industry. Now it’s seen as a scourge of cities like Richmond that embraced it in the 1960s as an ornamental well-suited to urban streets and yards.

Today, the Callery pear is “without a doubt, one of the biggest invasive species problems we have within the state,” says Lindsay Caplan, an invasive species specialist with the Virginia Department of Forestry.

It’s also an invasive species problem uniquely visible in Richmond. The Richmond Tree Inventory records some 1,330 Callery pears on city public property, with dozens clustering in Byrd and Bryan parks and lining blocks from the West End to Broad Rock Boulevard. That figure doesn’t include the thousands that are likely owned privately throughout the city.

“Because it is such a showy plant in the spring and because it’s virtually the only thing that’s flowering at that time … it’s really easy for people to see them across the landscape and notice them,” says Caplan. Other invasives, like English ivy, “are just kind of green.”

State’s first exchange in Charlottesville

In Virginia, the Callery pear’s fortunes may be about to turn. This Earth Day, following other states like North Carolina and Missouri, the Department of Forestry is holding the state’s first exchange of the species in Charlottesville. Virginians can bring up to three Callery pears from their property and swap them for native species like redbud or dogwood.

The effort was instantly popular: Exchange slots sold out, and even a waitlist is at capacity, with 289 native trees claimed, says Caplan.

Native plant experts hope the enthusiasm for getting rid of Callery pears can match the enthusiasm with which Virginians embraced them decades ago.

“Maybe these are something that can still be tackled,” says Matt Brooks, president of the Virginia Native Plant Society’s Pocahontas chapter, which includes Richmond and the surrounding counties.

In 1966, as part of a “beautification” push, two Richmond-area teenagers helped first lady Lady Bird Johnson plant a Bradford pear at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. By 1967, according to The Richmond Times-Dispatch, the city was growing the species in its municipal nursery. The Richmond Nurserymen’s Association selected the Bradford pear as the 1972 “Plant of the Year,” opening the floodgates for it to be planted on Kanawha Plaza, in Maymont, as part of memorials to city workers, at a groundbreaking for a Sam’s Club off Midlothian Turnpike and at countless other sites around the city.

What tree experts didn’t know then is that while the Bradford pear cultivar was sterile, it was capable of cross-pollinating with other Callery cultivars. Once it began to reproduce, the very traits that made it so attractive as an urban ornamental — its rapid growth and ability to thrive in tight, high-pollution environments — made it a menace.

“They grow very quickly, and they can grow in virtually any habitat. They don’t need specific soils, and they are very, very successful,” says Caplan. And because Callery pears are some of the earliest trees to emerge from their winter sleep, they crowd out other native species, depriving them of sunlight and other resources. Nor does it help that the Bradford pear is known for having limbs that break easily, posing a risk to any property in its orbit.

“A lot of the public doesn’t understand the problems in terms of biodiversity and money,” says Brooks. Even today, he says, “I would guess that people still plant them.”

Whether Saturday’s exchange puts even a small dent in Richmond’s Callery pear numbers remains to be seen. While the event is focused on landowners and not trees maintained on public property, Caplan says “bigger-picture conversations” about how to get rid of the species are on her mind, and the department hopes to bring the exchange to other parts of the state besides Charlottesville.

“We have been asked for this by the public,” she says. “People have been wanting us to do this.”