Peaches bear on last year's wood, every year you will need to prune it to head that wood back and to remove old wood to make room for new. Pruning that one for size won't be any additional work. But it may be easier to do all the pruning on the peach if it's not 15'. The pear will bear on long lived spurs so it will require very little pruning (if it's well behaved) once it's trained and probably reach larger than expected if you don't do size pruning. So you can only consider "to prune or not to prune" with the pear, and even then you're going to have damage control and thinning of some branches required. I've seen companies that were right on the money with their estimates and I've seen companies that greatly underestimate their sizes. I have never seen a company predict a huge size and hand out dwarf sizes. My rule of thumb is that if it's going to be other than claimed it will err to the large side. I've seen trees bought as dwarfs that dwarf my accurately sized semi-dwarf apple that's pushing 20 years with very little pruning later in life. I'd go dwarf for both. If you flipped the planting spaces around I may change to semi-dwarf for the pear just to get more fruit. But I wouldn't want to be climbing 15' to head back branches or be thinning out old 15' branches.

Scott is a huge asset to this forum and so is his list, but he has little interest in growing varieties that have a more common taste although they are not at all common to most people in the sense of tasting them at peak quality ripened on the tree. He doesn't review varieties like Jersey Queen or Loring which are luscious and wonderful varieties but are grown by commercial growers in Jersey and elsewhere. In fact he doesn't review a single variety that has been grown widely in Jersey as a commercial variety in recent years, although TangO's is getting there. I just believe, and Scott and I may disagree on this, that commercial success of a variety often means that it reliably produces crops of high quality peaches, although the two I mentioned can be a problem in frosty areas. I also think his testing methods are somewhat limited because it is about how they perform at a single site and in the context of growing using Surround and organically approved materials, using synthetic chemicals only as a last resort. Also, any variety on a part of his property likely to be hit by squirrels may not even get the chance to be evaluated. All that said, I have benefited greatly from Scott's input and actual grafting wood. A couple of his varieties are now a part of my collection, but the beginner might arguably be better off starting with varieties known to be resistant to bacterial spot and peach leaf curl and known to be adaptable to a range of sites. These trees can later be used to graft on varieties of Scott's suggestion- that is the only way you can get many of them anyway. Even most experienced growers aren't interested in growing 300 varieties of fruit, (I'm not). If you have 100 varieties of peaches it doesn't matter if a variety has a very short picking window (others are following or overlapping) or if it only crops 2 out of 3 years- or if it is available from a convenient source. The most important thing could become, how different it tastes from the other 99.

The Meiwa is not going to get large as a standard. The Powell and the Cara Cara will naturally be large so using a Semi-Dwarfing rootstock will help keep them manageable. The Moro will get almost as big. My preference for those would be C-35 and prune to keep them about 8-10' tall and wide. A Standard Meyer at a friends house was planted 25 years ago and is about 10' tall but tries to be wider than that. I planted standards as I was concerned that anything smaller would not grow big enough to espalier against a 6' block wall. I can't imagine using Flying Dragon for anything as it will grow so slowly, you will need to wait many years to see much growth. Many of these varieties have compatibility issues with different rootstocks so thinking that you are going to decide on the best one and then use it on all varieties will not work out well in the long run. You need to talk to a grower that knows the requirements for you area. What originally was called Dwarf was gradually mostly called Semi-Dwarf as you are not really limiting the eventual size of the tree as mostly picking a slower growing tree. Dwarfs are also trimmed more into a bush shape that I don't find looking right. A Meyer trimmed as a Semi-Dwarf Bush shape will natrually want to be 15' wide and 5' tall.

At my old property, i have about 25 tress from Stark Bros. I only had one dud, which they credited me for. As for the quality of what you get, i would say it is excellent. I originally went with them as they were the closest climate to where i lived. I was lucky that conditions there weren't as harsh as where i live now, so the root stock wasn't as much of an impact. Now i have sever summer droughts, and especially for stone fruit, I cannot use Citation for rootstock as my trees will go dormant by the 3rd week of July (without me watering regularly)! I have also had good results with BayLaurel and Bob Wells (though shipping from Bob Wells is brutal, so i ordered once and made a drive for the other trees i have from them).