Bradford pears do not behave invasively in Southern California, it is too hot sunny and dry! "Invasive" seems to mean vigorous growing. Plant varieties that are common in the rest of the country have trouble growing well here, so many of the popular plants in Southern California that do well without any maintenance are kind of borderline invasive, that is something I've noticed.

I can just rattle off a few: Mexican Fan Palm, Carrotwood, ficus, asparagus fern...

Bradford Pear is one of the few flowering trees that grow well here. Some others are jacaranda, coral trees, and silk floss trees. Coral trees grow to become very thick and huge, so many people do not have room, and both coral trees and silk floss trees have an array of spikes covering them, so are not appropriate for all situations. The Yellow Cotton Tree (Cochlospermum regium) is another flowering tree I think might do well here, though no one plants it.

More information about Cochlospermum regium: the common ornamental cultivar has beautiful double-flowering yellow blossoms and does not produce any messy seeds, like the Silk Floss tree it is native to Brazil, but has become a common ornamental tree in Thailand and other parts of Southeast Asia.

If you can think of a tree that works (Sourwood) but can't find one...maybe the problem is your local nurseries are crap? Perhaps turn to mail order, or post in a regional forum asking if any nurseries in your area sell them?

Small trees with good fall color...does Forest Pansy redbud, sassafras or sweetgum do well in your area?

Honestly, in your climate I'd wright off Fall Color...If I lived in LA, I'd focus on finding evergreen trees with interesting fruit or flowers. One of the biggest things that gets people into trouble is emulating garden looks that aren't appropriate for their area. You get more evergreen, fruit and flower options then we do...we get better Fall color.

No, invasive means capable of outcompeting native plants...and more importantly, whole native plant communities. So, here in Wisconsin, to offer an example, common buckthorn, an exotic invasive shrub, is capable of moving into a wooded area and eventually becoming virtually the only species of woody plant growing there. That's invasive...not whether some plant in somebody's garden crowds out another plant. It is this laksadaisical approach to understanding the native versus exotic invasive condundrum that is so frustrating for those of us actively involved in the battle.

Somebody on another Houzz forum once exclaimed that ground ivy, AKA "creeping charlie", aka Glechoma, was invasive because it was taking over her lawn. That is a perfect example of somebody who completely misunderstands what this term means in this context. First, her lawn is 100% non-native grasses, so there's no native plant community to be pushed aside. Completely wrongheaded, as is the statement in the post above this one.

sometimes the word "invasive" is informally used to describe plant species that tend to take over a large area, and have to be repeatedly cut back, or plants that have "invasive" roots that wreck havoc with the rest of the yard, or can cause sidewalks to buckle.

no reason to nitpick over semantics

In any case, all those species I described (with the exception of ficus) truly are kind of invasive, spreading by seed. I can't tell you how many Fan Palms, carrotwood seedlings, and asparagus fern I've seen sprouting up all over the place in people's yards. Fortunately I have never seen any of evidence of Bradford pear invasively spreading by seed in this climate. Things are too dry, and the young seedling would be scorched by the sun, wilt and turn brown.

If you are looking for a flowering cherry tree, the following varieties are have a low chill requirement: Taiwan cherry, kanzakura, okame, and youkouzakura

Cherry trees are still a little difficult to grow in this climate though, they require consistent water in the Summer. (and in my opinion, the blossoms on these low chill cherries are not quite as attractive as other varieties such as Kanzan or Yoshino)

Prunus mume (flowering apricot) may be another option.

I believe invasive describes a plant that can survive on it's own and takeover true natives. Thus, , while drought tolerant, plumbago will never jump the fence and thrive outside of regular, albeit, seldom watered areas. Therefore, neither ficus, or carrot wood or privet fit the mold. . Granted , they will sprout up in a neighbors watered property, but will not survive out in the boonies. Parker, thank you for flowering tree suggestions, but blossoms are not my goal.; it's autumn foliage in a medium- small tree I desire. Blossoms would nice, too, of course.

You have obviously never seen cherry tree foliage in the Fall !

https://washingtonphotosafari.com/images/wps_pages/Cherry_Blossom_Fall_Luria_photo.jpg

Ha ha ha...nope, not in sunset zone 23-24. :(.

The decorative pear that is noticeable in California is Pyrus kawakamii. That is planted quite a bit.

Kanzakura and youkouzakura aren't names that are likely to turn up anything for someone looking for trees in California commerce. One sold on the West Coast that has been spectacular in southern California plantings is 'Pink Cloud'.

http://www.lecooke.com/Images/Flowering/Cherries/Pink-Cloud-Flowering-Cherry%28RGB%29.pdf

So pretty! But does it have fall color even remotely close to the photo Parker posted? Thank you , embothrium!

Will Forest Pansy Redbud do well in your area? I know it does well in the Southeast US and San Francisco. It's becoming a bit faddish, so I'd expect it would be easy to find. What about trees with red foliage all year, like Japanese Maple?

no reason to nitpick over semantics

==>>> in many cases.. that might be true ... but in this case ... with a known invasive ... it can NOT be disregarded ...

does anyone agree that its not invasive in SO CA ....???

ken

I'd expect so, Ken, though I'm not well-versed in what's going on in that area. But thanks for backing me up. This is a little war I'm waging to have such terms used properly. It reminds me of how a few years back, a tiny percentage of people were found to not be able to digest the protean gluten, and now, every other person you meet is having a gluten issue. Same way with the phrase invasive species. Now, everybody thinks they know what that means, and as soon as they open their mouths..or their keyboards, they show the world that they do not. Like the lady with the "invasive" Glechoma in her turfgrass lawn. Zero understanding of the term. I'll be she doesn't tolerate gluten well either!

I agree with the general principle, wisconsitom but I'm not sure this is the place to wage this war. The OP asked a reasonable question. "Invasive" is a regionally specific term. Since OP says Bradford Pear only survive with artificial irrigation in her region, she asked if they could be invasive in her state. A reasonable question. Waging war on a commenter who used the term sloppily could cause confusion, since not everyone reads the older comments...and to those, it could sound like you are waging war on the OP.

Martinca, I feel for you living out there in a place where what many people feel is attractive is such a detriment to your environment. I have spent a week, 7 days! in the desert southwest and know what will help you.

Find a botanical garden as good as the desert botanical garden in Phoenix and visit it. If you don't have one locally go to Phoenix. Even in Phoenix in the basin where they build domes on stadiums because it is life threateningly hot to humans that botanical had more interesting plants than I had time to analyze. Ones largely native to deserts! https://www.dbg.org/

There are soo many people and soo little water in parts of California your yard just won't look like mine, but on the flip side, mine won't be able to look like yours! Trust me though, you can have flowers! Just pick well and you won't be dependent on water rights bickering and $$$'s for a few decades.

Far as invasive and Bradfords, I don't see them listed as such. However thanks to California's coast then dramatic and beautiful elevation changes your climate zones are soo compressed I question that. I would venture to guess yards in Los Angeles are frequented by birds which go up to the hills and the pass north of Devore (of that famous train derailment) where the climate is different and transport seeds with them. A step further, imagine my disappointment if when I go to Kings Canyon to see the Redwoods where I suspect Bradfords will grow without irrigation I see a bunch of stinky Callery Pears.

There are some 'Pink Cloud' cherries growing in Huntington Beach Central park. You might take a look there in the Fall.

http://santafemanagementinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/HuntingtonBeach-Apartments-CentralPark.jpg

(by the way, all the low-chill cherry varieties came from, not surprisingly, crossbreeding the Taiwan cherry with other varieties; in the case of Pink Cloud it resulted from an unintended pollination of a white serrulata variety)

Prunus mume also has a low chill requirement, 100-150 hours

Lagerstroemia indica do get mildew near the coast, but L. indica x L. fauriei are resistant. My campus is 4 miles from the ocean and our Natchez White flower beautifully and show no signs of mildew. Fall color is okay.

Cotinus coggygria had great fall color back east. I have seen them out here, but not during the fall. You may check into that.

No Ed, the term exotic invasive species does not mean different things in different locales. An individual species may behave differently in different parts of the country, but the meaning of that phrase does not change with state lines. In any case, I was disagreeing with something parker said up there, where the proper word would be aggressive....substituting invasive simply waters the meaning of that down to insignificance. If somebody's rose bush is getting crowded out by a neighboring plant, that has no bearing and no relationship to what is happening out in the wild, where invasive species are able to take over entire plant communities. Not the same thing at all. We can't communicate if each person has their own idea of what different words mean. At that point, we're just talking past each other, not to each other.

The term "exotic invasive" doesn't mean different things in different parts of the country. However, what constitutes an exotic invasive does differ. Everything is native somewhere. And things that are super-aggressive in one part of the country can barely survive in others.

I do agree with you about the misuse of "invasive". I wish people would just use "weed" or "weedy"...good old terms. It is dangerous to use terms more precise then what you are actually talking about. However...this is perhaps not the thread to discuss this point.

in the case of Pink Cloud it resulted from an unintended pollination of a white serrulata variety

I'm wondering how you know this Taiwan cherry and white Sato-zakura parentage specifically - if you have some reliable inside information. Otherwise an account I have seen - A. L. Jacobson in North American Landscape Trees (1996, Ten Speed, Berkeley) says

Originated as a chance seedling at the Huntington Gardens of San Marino, CA....Almost certainly a P. speciosa selection; possibly a hybrid involving P. campanulata.

That sounds to me like it is a spontaneous, found seedling, with people left to speculate on its parentage - unless somebody has paid to have some DNA work done on it.

Another thing I have seen is that there appears to be a different 'Pink Cloud' being grown in Australia or New Zealand, which from the few photos I have seen looks to be a more apparent P. campanulata derivative.

P. campanulata is the Taiwan cherry!

Come on, a white colored cherry has a seedling that ends up having pink flowers and that also happens to be low-chill? Where do you think its parent pollen came from??

Huntington Gardens has plenty of Taiwan flowering cherry trees on its grounds, do the math...

This article claims it came from a white P. serrulata variety: http://www.pacifichorticulture.org/articles/some-plant-introductions-from-the-huntington-botanical-gardens/ 

(I don't know, I suppose it is possible the article's authors got confused and made a mistake)

I would be surprised if it came from P. speciosa, those are hard to find outside of Japan. I would love to have an Oshima cherry though, someone tell me where I can find one.

So you don't in fact, know for sure. If somebody ever does some DNA work on the cherry then maybe we will know. Since DNA studies of plants started being done whole sets of them have been reclassified, it having turned out that going by their gross morphology alone was rather often not adequate.

I get "Page Not Found" so I can't read what they wrote. At least this time - I will have to see if I can get into it elsewhere.

Do yourself a favor and stay away from palm trees, that is any kind. They are messy, dirty, rat infested, expensive to trim when they get big and nothing will grow under them. Cost us over $3,000 to have 7 of them cut down(leaving stump) in VISTA CA. (10 years ago) We also had a Jacaranda which was nice except for when it dropped its sticky stuff on the car. Camp Verde Arizona.

PS you did ask for suggestions so I know this one would do well in your climate. Some might say no way, but we had one in VISTA CA and it did great. MIMOSA, pretty when it blooms, not much water, no thorns, will take heat(we also have them here in AZ)not to messy. Never once did we get breakage.

Blanket statements about palms, like the one above, miss the fact that there are numerous palms available, some holding onto their dead fronds, some not, some having any and every characteristic a person might desire. Way too over-broad as to be meaningless.

If you want a tree to stand there like a statue, never doing anything biological then a lot of them are unacceptable.

expensive to trim when they get big

This is prevented by choosing trees that don't get bigger than the situation calls for.

nothing will grow under them

Where palms are prevalent in the occupied landscape there are palms with grass and other plants beneath them every where you look. With their tiny root systems and the tendency of many popular kinds to hoist their comparatively limited crowns up on long bare stems these would appear if anything to be much more suitable for planting beneath than usual.

Those with fronds coming right to the ground or nearly so may of course be a different situation. You often can't easily get small plants to grow up underneath low branching evergreen shrubs of all kinds - this is not limited to palms.

Oh boy oh boy! A palm...that's it !!( op here) Some do present a few white? Kinda flowers maybe. sometimes?, and the browning fronds could replicate the *beauty of autumn, if one squints, maybe. Im glad you all have enjoyed fussing along without me :) and do really appreciate the very good advice and suggestions. For those of you unfamiliar with this area, coastal California, while having drought issues, is not the desserts of Arizona. Trees are important to our environment, and se maintain them with carefully monitoring our water . So while I'm no longer on the east coast, I needn't keep a dessert landscape. I will duck my head awaiting the flames to follow. Meantime, take a gander at my beloved liquid ambers.

Oops. Here they are on Dec. Late " bloomers". :). And, again, I do enjoy learning from you those of you who really know your trees, along with all ideas. Thank you!

Sweet gum is the main fall color tree of southern California plantings. However branching issues are common with this fast growing, unusually short lived tree - yours look like they have some.

Up here the forms that keep their leaves late and green into December break up during those occasional years we have wet, heavy snow while they are still in leaf.

Yes, I know, but I will cherish them while they are here. We trimed the limbs after this pic was taken and planted a new "baby" l.a. Hope you all knew I was tongue in cheek re the "oh boy , palms.

I love it when some one from Wisconsin zone 4/5 writes something so "meaningless" about palm trees. Do palm trees even grow in Wisconsin, outside? Oh yeh maybe plastic ones. Ref. Blog wisconsiton zone 4/5 his first hand knowledge and expenience is incredible.

P.s. Re. Liquidambars longevity: For anyone interested in them, no, they aren't terribly long lived ; mine in above pic were planted 35 years ago. So unless you're a youngster newly planting , they might give you many years pleasure.

You could try the longevity of the eurasian liquidambar orientalis instead, it might be better suited for a mediterreanean climate like that of California. But I don't know what kind of fall colors it have.

Not sure where you're trying to go with that, campv. I actually do know a thing or two about palms. There''s this little thing called travel, and I've done a good bit of it-to S. Florida specifically. News flash: There are lots of palms...and lots of palm species in S. Florida.