Winter Check-in On One of Our Chanticleer Pear Trees

Yesterday, I posted some photos of the buds on our front-yard Saucer Magnolia here on the blog and talked about how it appears to be quite happy and ready to put on a show once the weather warms up.  Today, I'm sharing a photo of a tree that tells a different story.  A, what I believe is going to turn out to be, a not-so-happy story.  That tree, above, is one of the Chanticleer Pear trees that we planted last year.  This one was planted before we moved in by the builder/landscaper.  It is just to the north of our driveway and right outside of our garage door. 

It is a big specimen - more than 3" caliper.  And it didn't do well last year.  At all.  Despite it being drenched pretty regularly - both from watering the grass but also by specific tree water-ers, it continued to turn brown and many of the leaves dropped prematurely.  I've posted about these flowering pear trees (Cleveland Pears, Chanticleer Pears, etc) over the years and had a few of them on our lot back in Elmhurst.  I had one of these planted (this one) and planted the other one DIY.  The one I planted was a 1.5" caliper, so it was much smaller than this one. 

In this Winter check-in, I noticed that ALL of the leaves are gone, which, if I remember from our past trees, is quite odd.  I remember these flowering pear trees holding onto brown leaves all the way through Winter?  But, I might be totally wrong.  Because the smaller one that I planted in the backyard (which I'll post about soon) looks very similar to this one:  bare. 

But, I'm not hopeful that this one survived.  I tried to bend some of the smaller branches and they didn't bend, but rather snapped pretty easily.  While that's not definitive, I'm pretty sure it is indicating that this one had a hard year and isn't likely to emerge in the Spring with leaves.  Time will tell, so I'm not call this one dead just yet, but I'm already thinking about having it replaced (in my mind) this Spring and maybe even adding another one next to it for some added color (in the Spring when the flowers come) and foliage (in the Summer when we can always use more screening to the North).

Consider this post a check-in on this tree.  Once the weather heats up, I'll revisit this tree - and others - with a proper post-cold-weather emergence post.