Sugar Pears

"Oh, sugar pears!" She said. "Those are good!"

I was pretty much agreeing. But the question on my mind was…. what sugar pears?

I was on the banks of the Machias River in Downeast Maine in August 2018, eating some slightly overripe Amelanchier fruits. Serviceberry, that is. Or shadbush, chuckley pear, Juneberry, sugar pear... you decide. A local came up to me and reminisced for a minute before she went back to fishing. ”Sugar pear" was her name for the fruits, and... she got one thing right. The fruits were in incredibly sweet and tasty. As for it being a pear...

"Pear" might send taxonomists into a bit of a snit, though these Amelanchiers and pears (Pyrus) are in the same family and all. Then again, the taxonomists have a hard time with Amelanchier too. According to the GoBotany website and local Maine botanist Arthur Haines:

Despite its small size, Amelanchier is a difficult genus. Frequent hybridization creates local, novel morphologies that can be very confusing, especially on herbarium sheets where the plants are removed from the context of sympatric species. Several species that exist in multiple races based on ploidy level sometimes differ subtly from one another. There also exist undescribed morphologies in New England, particularly in the eastern half of ME.

So there I was, in the "eastern half of ME" for sure, gobbling Amelanchier. And of course, collecting seeds. I mean, these fruits were deep purple and pure sugary goodness. Definitely the sweetest Juneberries I'd ever tasted (especially in August...)

So I collected seeds. They germinated in the ensuing two years, and here I am now with flowering specimens in the nursery. Because so much of Amelanchier identification relies on flowering material, I was hopeless with just the fruits and leaves.

This morning, I took out the GoBotany dichotomous key, my copy of Plants of Acadia National Park, and the Flora of North America key too. A 10x loupe, a metric ruler, and a few of the mystery Amelanchier from the nursery.

Honestly, I was all ready to coin a new species, because Amelanchier machiensis has a pretty nice ring to it, no?

I gathered some information from the specimens with my ruler and loupe handy:

Ovary summit glabrous

Racemes upright

Petals 9-11 mm

Leaves green at anthesis

Some leaves partially unfolded at bloom time

Blooms >4 per raceme

This fit Amelanchier canadensis pretty well in the keys, BUT the rachis and pedicels were glabrous, and the petals are a bit too long.

It fit Amelanchier intermedia even better, though I'd like to have seen a bit of purple-red in the foliage. A couple of other things seemed mildly off, but this is Amelanchier we're dealing with.

Some say that Amelanchier intermedia is of hybrid origin, with parentage from Amelanchier canadensis and Amelanchier laevis. So if a feature or two seems more like one possible parent than expected (for example, the mucronate-looking young leaves, or the relative lack of purple), that should be excusable.

Sugar pear? Serviceberry? Juneberry? You decide. But I feel pretty reasonable calling this delicious shrub Amelanchier intermedia.