Glossary · History
Pomona
Latin. Kept in its own language here rather than translated into the nearest English word, because the nearest English word is usually cut on a different axis.
Definition
A descriptive and usually illustrated book of fruit varieties. The word is from the Roman goddess of fruit trees, and the genre is the principal historic record of cider and perry cultivars.
- Subject
- History
- Language
- Latin
In more detail
The pomonas matter because they are often the only evidence of what a cultivar was called, where it grew and how it behaved before modern record-keeping. They are also unreliable in the ways period sources usually are: names are inconsistent, the same fruit appears twice under different headings, and quality judgements reflect the taste of their time.
The two most cited in the English cider literature are the Pomona annexed to Evelyn’s Sylva in 1664 — usually called Evelyn’s, though the Royal Society published it and six contributors are recorded for the volume, John Beale among them — and the Herefordshire Pomona of the 1870s and 1880s.
Related terms
Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.
History
Herefordshire Pomona
The illustrated survey of apples and pears produced by the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club in the late nineteenth century, and the most substantial visual record of English cider fruit of its period.
History
Royal Society cider committee
The group convened within the early Royal Society in the 1660s to gather and publish information on cider-making. *Pomona* is that enterprise’s output rather than one man’s book: it was annexed to Evelyn’s *Sylva* by express order of the Society, and its recorded contributors include John Beale, Daniel Colwall, Paul Neile, John Newburgh and Sylas Taylor alongside Evelyn.
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.
Fruit
Heritage variety
An old cultivar surviving outside mainstream commercial propagation, kept going by collections, enthusiasts and old orchards. The term implies age and rarity, not quality.
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.
Pomona, or an Appendix concerning Fruit-Trees in relation to Cider
John Evelyn, Royal Society · historical source · passage verified 2026-08-24 · covers 1664
Identified on 2026-08-24 from the 1670 edition held by the Internet Archive. The attribution needs correcting and CiderHQ has corrected it: *Pomona* is not a book by John Evelyn. It is an appendix annexed to Evelyn’s *Sylva*, published by express order of the Royal Society, and the contributors recorded for the volume are John Evelyn, John Beale, Daniel Colwall, Paul Neile, John Newburgh and Sylas Taylor. Beale has his own entry in this register, and the overlap is not a coincidence — the two texts come out of the same Royal Society enquiry into cider in the 1660s. Citing *Pomona* as Evelyn’s flattens a collaborative compilation into a single-author work.
Hereford Museum of Cider collections and interpretation
Hereford Cider Museum Trust · museum · retrieved 2026-08-24