Pears

The pear is among the several fruits whose origin is attributed to the Caucasus and Elburz mountains of western Asia and which spread in the footsteps of Caucasian civilization to all the temperate zones. Pears arrived in seventeenth-century eastern America chiefly as seeds or seedlings; improved stocks and named varieties as scions and dormant trees did not come to the colonies until the mid-eighteenth century. Thus, the American colonies had evolved their own pear varieties for some 150 years, outside the influence of English and Continental sources.