Glossary · Fruit
Sport
Also written bud sport, mutation. Each is a name for the same thing, which is why none of them has an entry of its own.
Definition
A shoot that differs genetically from the rest of the tree through a somatic mutation, and which can be propagated as a new cultivar. Many red-skinned strains of familiar apples arose this way.
- Subject
- Fruit
- Also written
- bud sport, mutation
In more detail
A sport shares its parent’s incompatibility alleles, so a sport and its parent cannot pollinate each other. Sports are also why two cultivars can be genetically almost indistinguishable while differing visibly in the orchard.
Related terms
Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.
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.
Orchard
Self-incompatible
Unable to set a useful crop from its own pollen. Almost all apples and pears are self-incompatible, so an orchard needs at least two cultivars flowering together.
Orchard
Graft
The joining of a scion to a rootstock so that their cambium layers unite and grow as one tree. It is the only reliable way to reproduce an apple or pear cultivar.
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.
University of Reading / Defra, Brogdale · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The UK national reference collection for apple and pear cultivars. The authority CiderHQ uses for whether two names are the same fruit, which is the central duplicate-resolution problem in cider data.
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.