PYRUS, PEAR TREE. 201 



it's very tender. 



The juice is sweet, flavorful & delicious. 



The seeds are brown. Some are broad & flat and others are small & very rounded. 

 Most of them fail to develop. 



The time that the fruit matures is variable as well. Usually it keeps until the end of 

 February. In 1 764 not a single one remained at the beginning of January. 



Merlet likens the Bezi de Chaumontel to the Beurre. If these two pears are not 

 exactly alike, they at least have a family resemblance. This along with their color 

 variations & the many common features of the Beurre & the Bezi de Chaumontel trees, 

 allows the Bezi de Chaumontel to be thought of as a variety of the Beurre. One must take 

 care to catch it in time and to pick it when it's just ripe. 



The pears shown in the figure are from Chaumontel itself & were given to me by 

 the landlord who owned the first Bezi de Chaumontel pear tree. It's still there in the same 

 spot where it grew from seed about a hundred years ago. The trunk and most of the large 

 branches now are hollow. It's seventeen feet nine inches tall. It's three feet eight-&-a-half 

 inches in circumference where the roots begin, & three feet two inches where the 

 branches begin. It's still vigorous & fruitful in its old age. This year, 1765, it yielded 

 many extremely beautiful pears. They're oblong, enlarged at the middle, becoming 

 smaller toward the top & much more so toward the stalk where they terminate in a very 

 blunt point. They're two inches nine lignes in diameter & three inches high. 



This pear gets to be much bigger & more strongly colored on espalier than it does 

 when grown in the open. Although this year's drought had been exceptionally long & 

 severe, I measured some pears 



