Wild Pear Tree

I have been wanting a nice fruit tree for a while - for the nice spring blossoms - I had been thinking of crab apples. I don't think this is it - although it can possibly have nice blossoms.

While researching native fruit trees and admiring the blossoms of an old pear tree in garden I discovered the pyrus pyraster which is close to being a native British pear tree. They were hard to obtain and I didn't want to compromise on nursery plant on grafted stock which was of mostly unknown origin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrus_pyraster

While walking through the CLGA game fair a few years ago a nice lady from the woodland trust gave me a wild pear seeding. And so its been growing in various pots in my garden for a few years and getting more interesting.

Its trunk is now over an inch thick and I began to think of it in bonsai terms - which means i had to get it into a proper pot and start managing the roots.

The problem with using conventional pots for growing bonsai material is that when you get it out of the pot you inevitably find the bottom of the pot is a solid disk of roots like this.

A series of large thick roots had grown down to the bottom and started doing laps of the pot. This is similar behaviour to my oak roots.

I'm hoping to see roots coming out of the sides of the pot soon after buds break so that I know its working as it should.

Here is the increasingly large group of airpot material waiting for the summer. I have several more oaks to move into these pots to prepare their roots for a life of bonsai.