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May. 11th, 2026 09:26 amHoly.
They say you can use cotoneaster as a rootstock for pears. That's pretty important because many rootstocks aren't super hardy, so with apples or pears or whatever many places will sell you something that's theoretically hardy to zone 2, 3, or 4 but on a rootstock that's only barely hardy to zone 4, and if the roots die the whole thing dies (this is pretty common for the largest nurseries that sell to bog box stores AND smaller nurseries)...
...er, where was I going with this. Cotoneaster, they say can be used as a pear rootstock. It's super hardy, i think some of them are invasive, but I went to look into it more and oh my goodness does the hedge cotoneaster (lucidus) look so so much like the rest of the rosaceae fruiting trees like apples, pears, etc.
It's kind of a weird time in plants because so many plants were put in familiaes based on what they looked like, studied in great detail for so long, and now we're going through with the genetic sequencing and exploding and changing those families pretty intensely. That means the visual tells of how plants are related -- cross-shaped flowers for the cruciferous plants (broccoli etc, now brassicas I think), the square stems of the mint family, the flowerheads of the asters, the fivefold flowers of the roses, those are fading into the background. And as they do so one of the building blocks for plant ID, namely, put it into a family and then you can narrow it down, that's going away. So much of plant ID used to be knowing a plant in a family and seeing that the unknown plant was related in some way. Now it's presented as a sea of random unconnected things.
I suspect this is why people have so much trouble with plant ID apps. They don't have the skill to look at a plant and see if it fits the description of the plant the app is guessing at. App gives you something with opposite leaves and your plant has alternating leaves? It may never have occurred to you that those are different.
It also means that existing in nature isn't an experience of being surrounded by relationships, by a web of aunties and grannies and fourth cousins six times removed and "oh my goodness that family does well in this situation" but instead by a bunch of individuals which, if you accept the industrialized view of evolution, are all in competition with each other.
Instead, of course, it's a web of relations which co-create an environment in which all can live. Even lichen, which doesn't need the soil everything else needs, brings its own relationships with it since it can't rely on everything that came before making somewhere suitable to grow.
And so our understanding of nature is always moving, following our political ideas, and we're in turn using it to prop up our actions, and everything becomes atomized.
It's my gift to have lived in a time when we still looked at plants deeply and connected them by physical traits *as well as* the genetics, and so I get both the astonishment of "a cotoneaster looks so much like a pear, of course it's in that family!" and ...you know, I'm not even sure what the more surprising taxonomic corrections are these days.
They say you can use cotoneaster as a rootstock for pears. That's pretty important because many rootstocks aren't super hardy, so with apples or pears or whatever many places will sell you something that's theoretically hardy to zone 2, 3, or 4 but on a rootstock that's only barely hardy to zone 4, and if the roots die the whole thing dies (this is pretty common for the largest nurseries that sell to bog box stores AND smaller nurseries)...
...er, where was I going with this. Cotoneaster, they say can be used as a pear rootstock. It's super hardy, i think some of them are invasive, but I went to look into it more and oh my goodness does the hedge cotoneaster (lucidus) look so so much like the rest of the rosaceae fruiting trees like apples, pears, etc.
It's kind of a weird time in plants because so many plants were put in familiaes based on what they looked like, studied in great detail for so long, and now we're going through with the genetic sequencing and exploding and changing those families pretty intensely. That means the visual tells of how plants are related -- cross-shaped flowers for the cruciferous plants (broccoli etc, now brassicas I think), the square stems of the mint family, the flowerheads of the asters, the fivefold flowers of the roses, those are fading into the background. And as they do so one of the building blocks for plant ID, namely, put it into a family and then you can narrow it down, that's going away. So much of plant ID used to be knowing a plant in a family and seeing that the unknown plant was related in some way. Now it's presented as a sea of random unconnected things.
I suspect this is why people have so much trouble with plant ID apps. They don't have the skill to look at a plant and see if it fits the description of the plant the app is guessing at. App gives you something with opposite leaves and your plant has alternating leaves? It may never have occurred to you that those are different.
It also means that existing in nature isn't an experience of being surrounded by relationships, by a web of aunties and grannies and fourth cousins six times removed and "oh my goodness that family does well in this situation" but instead by a bunch of individuals which, if you accept the industrialized view of evolution, are all in competition with each other.
Instead, of course, it's a web of relations which co-create an environment in which all can live. Even lichen, which doesn't need the soil everything else needs, brings its own relationships with it since it can't rely on everything that came before making somewhere suitable to grow.
And so our understanding of nature is always moving, following our political ideas, and we're in turn using it to prop up our actions, and everything becomes atomized.
It's my gift to have lived in a time when we still looked at plants deeply and connected them by physical traits *as well as* the genetics, and so I get both the astonishment of "a cotoneaster looks so much like a pear, of course it's in that family!" and ...you know, I'm not even sure what the more surprising taxonomic corrections are these days.
