Best Asian Pear trees for the UK

I grew a Kumoi one, very nice tree lots of fruit, nothing around to pollinate so I guess self fertile.
Fruit is nice if you pick it off the tree when a bit "hard".
Fruits do not keep and go soft and lose flavour, even ones on the tree if at all soft do not taste as good, you do need to get it when it feels pretty hard, but they are nice. However with 100lb of fruit you simply cannot eat it all. It did break branches with the weight of fruit and it did not show biannual tendencies. Just cropped heavily.

Mine grew to about 15-20 foot and was a fair size. No idea what the rootstock was.

As side information the leaves do not sort of compost as deciduous trees here do, they turn black and turn leathery.

Nothing seemed to effect it, sun, drought, wet, water, frost all had what is best described as no damn effect at all.

Trying to recall if a small catapiller found the fruit pleasant to burrow into, think there was and it got in via the blossom when it fruit formed. Didn't bother me as a lot of fruit and unless picked at the right time they were welcome it it.

Biggest problem was 1) the sheer amount of fruit, 2) unless picked early the taste was poor.

Did you get one?

Hi Rob,

Came across this today when looking on forum for information about Asian pears. Was thinking of getting one.

Did you buy one in the end? And if so, what variety, and if you were doing it again would you get the same or something different?

Cheers,
Graham

I doubt you'll get an answer they've not been active of the forum for the last couple of years

I'm trying to espalier train a 20th century asian pear (Nijisseiki). I planted it last winter, so it's still early days, but if it fruits I'll report back.

My Nijisseiki is hit and miss, some years are great, whereas last year after having literally a hundred blooms I got a single pear come September

I would personally stay away from Shinseiki. I had it in my back garden. I found it to be very disease prone, in fact I lost it to what looked like fire blight. It did fruit heavily with only European pears for pollination, it required heavy thinning to get the pears to any size. The flavour was good and texture like an apple. I plan on planting another Asian pear but will be a different variety.

Thanks

Thanks for advice flynch, i’ll Avoid that one.