'Danhua', a new hardy and free thinning fruit pear cultivar

Most of the inflorescence type of the wild and cultivated pear cultivars are multifloral (more than 5 flowers inflorescence-1). Nowadays, many pear breeders from all around the world are working on how to get novel single flower inflorescence germplasm and apply that in the pear breeding process, thus resolving technical challenges and decreasing the management costs in production. The new pear cultivar 'Danhua', selected from a variant branch with the single-flower feature of 'Daxiangshui' pear in 1999, was released in 2016. The mother cultivar is a traditional pear type and was grown in northeast of China before 1990. The fruit ripens during middle September at Jilin province of China. The single-flower feature can be stable in the offspring by asexual reproduction. The tree from bud, grafted on seedling rootstock of wild pear (Pyrus ussuriensis Maxim.) is rather upright, moderately vigorous with abundant spurs, which begin to bear after 4 years old. Anthesis is middle about May Day, and most inflorescences put up single-flower feature. It is strongly resistant to cold (can endure -35 degrees C and even lower), as well as insensitive to scab and brown spot in fruit and leaf. 'Danhua' pear is usually oval and weighs 158 g, relatively large compared with other pears of Pyrus ussuriensis like 'Nanguo', 'Xiaoxiangshui', 'Huagai' or 'Jianba'. The skin is green or yellow-green, yellow when nearly ripe. The flesh is hard so that fruit just picked cannot be eaten as occidental pear cultivars and turns soft and juicy after ripening with sweet and sour flavor and aroma. The fruits' degrees Brix is 13.8% and total acidity is 0.74%. Quality for fresh market is good. In addition, fruits have high juice yield with cloud juice 80.9%, clear juice 62.1%, total acidity 0.77% and sugar:acid ratio 14.6. Therefore it could have a dual purpose for fresh market and juice extraction.