Half-standard

Related terms

Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.

• Orchard

  Standard

  A tree grown on a vigorous rootstock with a clear trunk of about 1.8 to 2.1 metres before the first branch, forming a large canopy that can be grazed or mown beneath.

• Orchard

  Bush

  A small tree on a dwarfing or semi-dwarfing rootstock with a short stem, planted at high density and cropping within a few years of planting. Most cider fruit grown commercially since the mid twentieth century comes from bush orchards.

• Orchard

  Rootstock

  The root system onto which a fruiting cultivar is grafted. It governs the tree’s eventual size, its speed into bearing, its anchorage and its tolerance of soil conditions, without changing the fruit itself.

• Orchard

  MM106

  A semi-dwarfing apple rootstock bred for woolly aphid resistance, giving a self-supporting half-standard or large bush. It has been the workhorse of twentieth-century cider bush orchards.

Where to go next

• Cider glossary — The whole vocabulary, by subject and A–Z.
• Comparisons — Terms that are only really clear when set against the thing they are not.
• Search — Finds terms by their aliases and by their spellings in other languages.

Sources

What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.

• NIAB (incorporating East Malling Research)

  NIAB · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24

  East Malling developed the M-series apple rootstocks that determine tree size in essentially every modern orchard, cider orchards included. The authority CiderHQ uses for rootstock behaviour.

• A Somerset Pomona: The Cider Apples of Somerset

  Liz Copas, The Dovecote Press, 2001. ISBN 9781874336877 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25

  Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library: Liz Copas, The Dovecote Press, 2001, ISBN 9781874336877. The author was Long Ashton’s cider pomologist, which is why this work is registered for Somerset cultivar identity at all — it is the nearest thing to a successor to the station’s own descriptions. No copy was opened. Not digitised in any open collection.