Glossary · Fruit
Wilding
Definition
A tree grown from a chance seedling rather than grafted from a known cultivar, and the fruit it bears. Wildings supplied much of the fruit in old hedgerow and farm orchards.
- Subject
- Fruit
In more detail
Every named cider apple began as a wilding that somebody thought worth propagating. Most are worthless for cider, a few are useful in a blend, and the occasional one is exceptional — which is the mechanism by which the traditional cultivar stock accumulated in the first place.
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.
Fruit
Crab apple
A small, hard, very acidic and often astringent apple, whether a wild species or a small-fruited cultivar. Crabs are used as orchard pollinators, occasionally as a source of acid and tannin, and traditionally for verjuice.
Orchard
Seedling rootstock
A rootstock grown from seed rather than from a clonal stool bed. Vigorous and variable, it was the standard basis of traditional orchards before the Malling series was selected.
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.
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.
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.
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.