By Lauren Cormier
In early March 2025 Bowdoinham-based horticulturalist Blaine Fortin passed away, leaving behind a 30-year pear-breeding legacy in need of preservation for the future. MOFGA’s Maine Heritage Orchard, a 10-acre preservation orchard in Unity, Maine, is already home to 30 pears and now another pear preservation project is underway.
Those involved with the Maine Heritage Orchard deeply admired Blaine for his knowledge of plants and the remarkable pear-breeding trials that he carried out on his 12.5-acre property. Over the last few years, I was able to get to know him, and back in October 2024 I visited his orchard with other MOFGA staff members Jack Kertesz and CJ Walke, and Aaron Parker of Edgewood Nursery. We ate pears and strolled around Blaine’s mature nut forest — and were blown away by the abundance of fruit and nuts being produced in such a small space. Blaine wasn’t a commercial orchardist and for the most part his backyard pear breeding flew under the radar. Yet each year he gave away bushels of pears to gleaners, the food pantry, and anyone who wanted to come pick.
Blaine and his wife Pam moved to their property in 1995 after building a house in an open hayfield. The only trees were a sugar maple, a clump of birch, and a few poplars. He quickly began planting nuts and shade trees across the expansive field, many of them from seed he collected himself. He scoured nursery catalogs, acquired interesting plant material through North American Fruit Explorers (NAFEX), and often wrote letters to the authors of his favorite horticultural books. He grew wild fruits, nuts, ornamentals, native shrubs, shade trees, and herbaceous perennials, and the hayfield eventually evolved into a food forest.
Blaine’s pear breeding began about 30 years ago when he first crossed an Asian pear with a European pear tree growing near the Frank J. Wood bridge in Brunswick. He had begun seeing Asian pears at the market for the first time and was intrigued by the russeted “apple pear” called 20th Century, a pear that also goes by the name Nijisseiki. He thought it would be interesting to cross it with the “Bartlett-type” European pear by the bridge, as he would say.
He grafted scions from the European pear onto rootstock to create a row of parent trees that were genetically identical to the original tree and could be used for backcrossing. He simultaneously planted seeds from 20th Century pears from the market. When the seedlings of 20th Century began flowering, he pollinated them with the European pear flowers to create the first generation of hybrid pear seedlings. The best trees were selected based on physical traits, particularly absence of thorns. He planted the first batch of selections into the orchard and when they eventually began flowering, he backcrossed them with the European parent to create the second generation of hybrids. Selections from the second generation of pears were grafted about 5 to 6 feet up the trunks of the first-generation trees to maximize space. For this reason, many of Blaine’s trees have two pear varieties. His process resulted in hundreds of different unique pears being easily reachable for taste testing. From these two parents he bred hundreds of genetically unique selections and planted them into a high-density orchard at 10-foot spacing between trees and rows. I’d roughly estimate 200 or more selections, though it’s really hard to know exactly because many trees have two varieties and there’s more pears scattered beyond the orchard rows. It’s likely that the orchard contains more genetic diversity of Pyrus than anywhere else in the state.
Overall, the trees have physical characteristics typical of Asian pears in foliage, bark, flowers, and growth habit. There is an astounding range of shapes and flavors in the fruit, some being round and resembling the Asian parent and others having a pyriform shape typical of European pears. Many pears have a robust sweet flavor while others are mild or even tannic. Skin thickness varies considerably. The most common flavors used to describe the pears are butterscotch, caramel, pineapple, and wine. Blaine thought that the European parentage contributed to a more robust flavor than what is typical of Asian pears and, in some cases, a softer “buttery” texture.
Blaine’s orchard practices were innovative and thoughtfully executed. The pears were meticulously pruned to have horizontal scaffold branches extending from trees that are no more than 15 feet tall. He used wooden limb spreaders to train each branch just where he wanted it and bypassed the common challenge of pear trees becoming too tall by adopting summer pruning methods that reduced vigor, similar to those used for training a tree to an espalier. He would remove unwanted vertical growth from the scaffold branches while it was small and never pruned during winter or spring. By doing so he avoided the vigorous vegetative response pears typically have to dormant pruning — numerous thick upright water sprouts that come back year after year. It’s hard not to wonder how the trees being on their own roots, rather than grafted onto rootstock as is common, has affected their overall health and resiliency. Blaine claimed he never had a need to spray.
Not knowing what would ultimately become of the property once it sold, we felt it would be wise to preserve some of Blaine’s hybrid pear crosses and graft some trees. Blaine had not named any of his selections nor were there any formal maps of the orchard. In spring 2025, I teamed up with a few people dedicated to preserving Blaine’s orchard and gave each selection a numbered code so that we could make notes about flavor and distinguish the trees from one another. We collected dormant scionwood, grafted hybrid pears onto Pyrus betulaefolia rootstock in MOFGA’s nursery, and began preparing ground in the South Orchard on MOFGA’s campus, where the pears will be planted within the next couple of years.
Incredibly, the Fortin’s property has since been sold to Danielle Poulin and Stuart Weymouth, who are enthusiastically managing the orchard just like Blaine would have done. The pears live on!
The Maine Heritage Orchard crew was fortunate to have met Blaine when we did. He expanded our minds to orchard practices that were completely out of the box and raised the bar for the amount of genetic diversity a small-scale pear orchard can have in Maine. He was also a wonderful friend with a generosity that was rare, always giving far more than he received, and a kind spirit that we will remember with love as we help preserve his legacy.
Lauren Cormier is an orchard specialist at MOFGA and works in the Maine Heritage Orchard. She identifies and preserves historic pears around the state.
This article was originally published in the winter 2025-2026 issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener.