Packham's Triumph Pear

Packham's Triumph has one of the best-documented pear origin stories in existence, traceable down to a specific pruning knife. Charles Henry Packham (1842-1909) was born at Toongabbie, near Sydney, and moved with his free-settler parents to Larras Lake, near Molong in the New South Wales Central West, in 1848. He began experimenting with growing pears in the late 1870s at his property, "Clifton," at Garra, and won a prize for his pears at the 1889 Sydney Royal Show. In 1896, he successfully grafted together a Bell pear (Uvedale's St. Germain) and a Williams' Bon Chrétien — the same variety already documented in this database as Bartlett — and sent samples of the resulting fruit to the newly established New South Wales Agricultural Department. The department's fruit expert, W.J. Allen, was so impressed that he declared it, in a real, documented quote, "without exception the best pear I have ever seen... it is a triumph in pear culture," which is genuinely the direct source of the variety's name — Packham himself had originally suggested calling it "Packham's Seedling." Real, poignant postscript: despite becoming one of the most commercially significant pears in the world, Packham's own orchard of roughly 20,000 seedlings at Garra was completely grubbed out within a decade of his 1909 death, and today no trace of what was once one of Australia's most significant orchards remains. The variety now accounts for roughly 60% of all pear production in Australia and is grown commercially across South Africa, Argentina, and Chile. The fruit has pale green skin turning pale yellow at ripeness, with soft, smooth, juicy white flesh and a mild, musky flavor, and is genuinely valued for both fresh eating and its strong storability.