About This Tool
The Heritage Fruit Variety Finder is a searchable encyclopedia of over 6,974 heritage fruit varieties, with a focus on those that were available in the Pacific Northwest between the 1850s and World War II. It aims to be a comprehensive reference for anyone trying to identify, research, or preserve the historic apple, pear, and crab apple varieties that once grew in Oregon, Washington, and the surrounding region.
It is maintained by the Heritage Apple Corps, a volunteer organization dedicated to identifying, preserving, and promoting heritage apple varieties in the Pacific Northwest.
Why These Sources
The core reference material comes from the major 19th- and early 20th-century pomological books — comprehensive works like Beach's Apples of New York, Downing's Fruits and Fruit Trees of America, and Hedrick's Pears of New York that attempted to catalog every known variety of their day. These provide the detailed descriptions, illustrations, and synonym lists that form the backbone of each entry.
The nursery catalogs were chosen based on whether a variety listed in them could plausibly have found its way to the Pacific Northwest. This includes:
- Local PNW nurseries — Oregon and Washington operations that directly sold fruit trees to regional orchardists
- National mail-order catalogs — large nurseries like Stark Bros. that shipped trees across the country
- California nurseries — West Coast growers with close ties to the PNW fruit trade
- English nurseries — varieties from firms like Bunyard and Rivers may have reached the region via Vancouver and the British Columbia connection
Eastern nurseries from Massachusetts, New York, and elsewhere are included where they operated as mail-order businesses or were historically significant enough to have supplied stock that migrated west.
What You'll Find Here
Each variety entry includes whatever information we could gather from our source documents:
- Descriptions from pomological reference books (the primary source for most entries)
- Historical nursery catalog appearances showing where and when each variety was sold
- USDA Pomological Watercolor illustrations, where available
- Plate illustrations and woodcut engravings from the original books
- Attributes like flavor, season, color, and uses (extracted from the descriptions)
- Synonyms and alternate names, cross-referenced across sources
How It Was Built
The data was assembled from 9 public-domain pomological reference books and over 100 historical nursery catalogs. The books were processed page-by-page to extract variety entries, descriptions, and plate illustrations. Nursery catalogs were similarly processed to capture which varieties were commercially available, where, and when.
Variety names are cross-referenced across all sources using a synonym database of nearly 5,000 entries, so that the same variety appearing under different names in different books or catalogs is unified into a single entry.
Currently: 693 varieties appear in both books and catalogs, 5,875 are found only in books, and 406 only in catalogs. 1,347 varieties have at least one illustration.
A Living Project
This is a work in progress. New catalogs and sources are added periodically, variety descriptions are refined, and errors are corrected as we find them. If you notice an error or have information to contribute, please get in touch.