They had distinctive buds
and distinctive fruit.
The leaves were pinnately veined.
How to identify this intriguing tree? The books that I got to help me identify unkown trees (What Tree is This and The Tree Identification Book) usually leave me frustrated. What usually works is flipping through Trees of New York. However, I could see that this was a cultivated tree, so I did not expect it to be in Trees of New York. I expected it to be in The Sibley Guide to Trees, but that's a 400 page book. How could I look through every page of that book until I found it?
Once I became aware of this type of tree, I realized that it was in other places I frequented (the Union, the quad between Lally and Sage, and downtown by the Atrium).
This is the one near Sage, photographed November 14:
I had four days off for Thanksgiving, so finally I looked through The Sibley Guide to Trees. I found it was not nearly as hard as I had feared. There were some sections that were clearly not right, so I could skip those sections. The tree that seemed to match was the Callery Pear. It matches in this ways:
- Leaf shape.
- Leaf autumn color.
- Tree shape.
- Commonly cultivated.
- Late fall foliage.
- Fruit. Actually, the fruit I saw on the trees was a little different from how it looked in the book, but it was the closest match compared to the fruits of other trees in the book.
