Who is this? Do I want to keep, give away or mow down?

To me it looks a lot like Loquat (Rhaphiolepis bibas)

Not familiar with it but after looking at the plant database I'll either give it away or mow it down.

I found an old photo of a couple of seedlings sprouting in the lawn at our old house, photo from January, 2011:

Is loquat as messy as it looks like it could be?

If a neighboring property has the trees you will get them sprouting now and again. Squirrels eat the fruit and Gray Catbirds love them. Some folks make Loquat Jelly/Preserves with the fruit. Fruit is sweet but there's very little of it surrounding the pit/seed. A lady I worked with years ago used to make jelly that was quite good but wow, someone must have the patience of a saint for making it because it would take many, many fruits to get enough for a recipe!

To me they are a bit messy if the fruit starts rotting and falling to the ground; what I disliked most were so many sprouting up all over the backyard. I used to ride the lawnmower around the yard to mow them down and yanked out the smaller ones that sprouted in flower beds.

I find the loquat to be a beautiful tree, and if you pick and eat the fruit, you eliminate the rotting problem. My loquat has a lot of fruit and not that many seeds.

or Medlar (Mespilus germanica)
https://www.google.cz/search?q...

Thanks Stefan but the leaves of the Medlar are the wrong color. I'm thinking it is the loquat.

the color is not decisive, but the shape, cutting, deployment. It tells you exactly when, according to the fruit

Huh?

Porkpal, our neighbor at our old house had Loquat trees along the entire fence line between our properties ... those trees bore a ton of fruit. Each fruit was surrounding a couple of large, brown seeds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... There was enough fruit for wildlife and humans and then some.

Mespilus germanica has much prettier flowers than Eriobotrya, I wonder if they are fragrant?

That certainly looks like a loquat to me, it is unusual for me to recognize a plant right off, and that plant just said loquat as soon as I saw the photo. My Mom had lots of them, but some type of disease would get in them and kill them way back, sometimes completely kill them. They were beautiful trees when in their prime, but were very messy with fruit and leaves. Most of the fruits on her trees were mostly seed, but in special years the fruit was bigger, still you had to work around the seeds to get any fruit.

Yep .. gonna get hit with weed killer and mowed over (I have a feeling that the ivy is going to be very hard to get rid of). Thankfully it's a little tree. The back yard is very shaded, covered in trees and branches, this weekend I'm gonna have 3 loblolly pines and a water oak taken out and the branches pruned back from the remaining trees to get more sun. 80% of what I grow wants full blazing hot sun.

The property is a strange pie shaped. Totally fenced in with privacy and back up to a small creek. The red squares are the trees being taken out.

yep, cul-de-sac lot. So you moved? I knew you were talking about it awhile back.

I'm in the process.

plantladylin said: Mespilus germanica has much prettier flowers than Eriobotrya, I wonder if they are fragrant?

I don't know how it smells, but the fruit is very tasty, as big as apricot

I agree that they can be messy. Any edible fruit tree is a good thing but only if you have the room and the time to process the fruits. Where we live the fruit attracts little boys who climb the trees, breaking the limbs and throwing the fruit at each other. That can be messy. No one person in this neighborhood gets to actually eat the fruit.

Love my loquat tree! It's too young to bear fruit. But i can't wait. Large beautiful dark green leaves. Medium-sized tree, maybe 20 ft.? Very frost resistant. There is something very Zen about them, like an overgrown Bonsai. Lol