Cherry and Pear Wood Pipes

Cherry and pear wood pipes were the most sensible solution at hand for European turners before tree heath came to dominate the pipe world. Clay broke, meerschaum was expensive; fruitwood logs from the garden or forest, by contrast, were both plentiful and soft enough to shape readily on a foot-powered lathe. Neither wood fully left the stage even after briar's rise.

The Woods of the Pre-Briar Era

Boxwood, beech, maple, and cherry were among the woods worked in France's Jura region from the 18th century onward. The region was already a center of turning: for workshops making rosary beads, buttons, spoons, and boxes, the pipe was simply one more product that could be made on the same lathe already at hand. It's said that turners around Saint-Claude were still working largely with these native woods in the mid-19th century. Once the transition described in the briar revolution and Saint-Claude was complete, fruitwoods fell to second place, since briar was both far more heat-resistant and far longer-lived.

The figure who institutionalized the cherrywood tradition was Eugène-Léon Ropp. Ropp took out a patent for a wild-cherry pipe in 1869 and set up a workshop the following year in Bussang, in the Vosges mountains. Production moved to Baume-les-Dames around 1893; the brand began being distributed in England and its colonies through A. Frankau & Co. just before the First World War. The firm gradually turned to briar as well, but cherrywood pipes remained Ropp's signature right up to its 1991 closure. The brand name was later revived under a different French maker, Cuty-Fort.

The Character of the Woods

The best-known form of cherrywood pipe is the one that keeps the branch's natural cross-section, leaving part of the bark outside the bowl. This look lightens the pipe and gives it a rustic identity. On the other hand, cherrywood isn't as dense as briar; the bowl wall heats up, a woody taste can be pronounced until the cake layer settles in, and the pipe is generally shorter-lived.

Pear wood, by contrast, is a far more uniform material for pipe makers: knot-free, fine-grained, and taking stain and polish evenly. Unlike cherry's rustic look, pear lends itself to smooth-surfaced, classically lined stummels. The Mr. Brog workshop, operating in Poland since 1947, states in its own marketing that it dries its pearwood stummels for two seasons; such drying-time claims are difficult to verify from independent sources. Pear's old standing in ornamental objects and printing-block manufacture carries over into pipes as a consistent workability.

Their Place Today

These two woods are now candidates less to replace briar than to form their own separate class alongside it. Like the corn cob pipe, cherry and pear are considered light, unassuming, and easily obtained options. In the experiments gathered under pipes in woods other than briar, fruitwoods are generally noted as short-lived but characterful examples.