Glossary · Perry
Perry pear conservation
Definition
The organised work of finding, identifying, propagating and replanting surviving perry pear cultivars, most of which exist as a handful of ageing trees.
- Subject
- Perry
In more detail
Conservation for perry pears is unusually urgent because the trees are old, the cultivars are local, and the fruit is commercially marginal. National collections, county trusts and DNA fingerprinting projects together resolve which trees are which, which names are duplicates, and which cultivars are down to single specimens.
Where this is covered properly
The glossary defines; these pages explain. Each is described in its own words.
Related terms
Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.
Perry
Perry pear
A pear cultivar grown for fermentation rather than for eating, characterised by high tannin, high acid or both, small size, and flesh too hard and astringent for the table.
Orchard
Traditional orchard
An orchard of widely spaced standard or half-standard trees on vigorous rootstocks, with a permanent grassland floor that is grazed or mown. In the United Kingdom it is a recognised priority habitat.
Orchard
Veteran tree
An old tree carrying the features that come with age — hollowing trunk, decaying heartwood, dead limbs, loose bark and cavities — which together make it habitat for species that live nowhere else in the orchard.
Orchard
Grubbing up
Removing an orchard by pulling out the trees and their roots. In Britain and much of Europe it was carried out at scale in the later twentieth century, in places with public grant support.
Fruit
Cultivar
A named clone propagated by grafting, so that every tree of it is genetically identical to the original seedling. "Variety" is used interchangeably in trade, though it has a stricter botanical meaning.
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.
National Perry Pear Centre, Hartpury · specialist organisation · passage verified 2026-08-24
Read on 2026-08-24 — and the address CiderHQ had registered, perrypears.co.uk, is no longer the Centre at all. It fails the TLS handshake over https, and over plain http it resolves to a Sedo domain-parking page: an earlier pass in this sprint recorded it as retrieved on the strength of an HTTP 200, which was wrong, and the correction is the point. The Centre publishes at nationalperrypearcentre.org.uk. It is the closest thing British perry has to an identity authority: it holds at least two examples of most known varieties, states that the DNA of most of them has been determined and is used as an aid to identification, and publishes a variety register with synonym lists. Its 121-variety register is transcribed into the perry pear records, including the nineteen names it shows being claimed by more than one variety.
Gloucestershire Orchard Trust · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Marcher Apple Network · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Has rediscovered and DNA-fingerprinted a number of lost Welsh border cultivars. Cited for identity work on cultivars the national collections do not hold.