Glossary · Culture
Plant pears for your heirs
Definition
A traditional saying of the perry counties, recording that a perry pear planted now will not crop meaningfully in the planter’s working life but will feed generations after.
- Subject
- Culture
In more detail
The proverb is an accurate statement of horticulture as well as a piece of folk wisdom: perry pears on their own roots can take decades to come into full bearing and then crop for two centuries or more. It is also the argument for conservation planting, where the return is deliberately deferred.
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
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.
Perry
Perry pear conservation
The organised work of finding, identifying, propagating and replanting surviving perry pear cultivars, most of which exist as a handful of ageing trees.
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.
Where to go next
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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.
Perry Pears
L. C. Luckwill and A. Pollard (eds), published for the National Fruit and Cider Institute by the University of Bristol, 1963 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25 · covers 1963
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library, which records the work as Luckwill, 1963, published for the National Fruit and Cider Institute by the University of Bristol. The catalogue entry names Luckwill alone where the standard citation names Luckwill and Pollard as joint editors; CiderHQ keeps both names and records the discrepancy rather than silently following one catalogue. This is the foundational descriptive work on English perry pears and the ancestor of most later variety lists. No copy was opened: it is sixty years old, out of print, and held in research libraries rather than in open digital collections.
Gloucestershire Orchard Trust · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24