Ornamental Pear Tree Shapes

Wondering about ornamental pear tree shapes? There are not many better beautiful trees for urban landscapes than the ornamental pear. They are fast growing and tolerant of most soil types, and don’t get too big. Best of all, ornamental pear trees have beautiful spring blossoms, lush shiny green foliage for late spring and summer, and gorgeous autumn colour.

Because they are so popular, there are many varieties of ornamental pear trees around. So how do you choose which is best for you? By shape!

We found that there wasn’t much info around to guide people in their ornamental pear tree selection. So late one night, Chris did some sketching and we created the “Ornamental Pear Tree SHAPE-O-METER”! This shows the shape of our most popular ornamental pear varieties.

These are the final shapes of ornamental pear trees once they reach maturity, based on Chris’ years of observation of hundreds of examples of these varieties actually growing around Melbourne.

Ornamental pear tree shapes for pleaching

We also threw in some pleached pear hedge shapes, for the two best Ornamental Pears for pleaching; Everscreen and Manchurian.

Stunning pleached ornamental pear screening hedge by Andrew Stark Landscape Design

Pleaching is where a tall screen with space underneath for lower growing plants is created. This is done by planting a row of trees together, and training or pruning them to shape. The lower part is cut back to make space for underplanting. This works very well against fences to create a leafy height extension that blocks out neighbours.

Ornamental pears are a great tree to use for pleaching. Everscreen is the only one that is evergreen and keeps its leaves all year round. Manchurian is deciduous, so will let light in during the winter months. Check out this article on pleaching and other trees you can use for this effect.

How big do different ornamental pear trees grow?

We recently created a handy chart to give a comparison for the shapes of different popular ornamental pear varieties, which also includes their maximum heights and widths. This is in addition to the ornamental pear tree shapes above.

Keep in mind that these sizes are the very largest these trees will ever get in absolutely ideal conditions. Most ornamental pears won’t ever get to this full size. They are also easily, and often, maintained at a lower height or narrower width by giving them a trim once a year.

So don’t be daunted if this chart makes ornamental pear tree sizes seem a lot larger than you thought. For example, the most popular variety of ornamental pear, the Capital pear, has a maximum height of 8-10m on this chart, but is usually maintained at around only 4m tall.

Ornamental pear varieties currently available:

More information about ornamental pear trees:

• You can find more info about ornamental pear trees on our dedicated factsheet page.
• Check out all available ornamental pear trees for sale here.