Orange Pippin logo
All about apples, pears, plums, and cherries - and orchards where they are grown

Welcome to Orange Pippin

If you are interested in apple varieties, pears, cherries or plums, or orchards where these fruits are grown, you have come to the right place.

Fruit tree varieties

Descriptions of over 700 apple and cider apple varieties, as well as crab-apples, pears, plums, fruiting cherries and ornamental cherries, apricots, and peaches and nectarines.

Advanced search
Fruit tree pollination checker

Orchards

Listings for over 2,000 orchards in the United States, Canada, UK and elsewhere.

Tree register

Our Fruit tree register has details of more than 11,000 trees registered by their owners, including blossom and harvest records.

Our website is named after England's most famous apple variety - Cox's Orange Pippin - widely regarded as the finest of all dessert apples. 'Pippin' is an old English word derived from the French word for 'seedling', and like many old apple varieties Cox's Orange Pippin was discovered as a chance seedling.

Recent variety reviews

You can add your own comments on any variety page.

  • Apple - McIntosh

    14 Jun 2025 
    I have always eaten Macintosh apples because of their delightful aroma and softness. In the last few years, they were getting harder to find. I find other apples have no aroma and are too hard. Lately, the Macintosh has changed. They are no longer aromatic, and they are hard. I won't be buying these anymore unless they return to what they were.

  • Apple - Florina

    12 Jun 2025 
    I bought this tree at a discount supermarket as a bare rootball tree for the princely sum of £1.99. It was planted in a very boggy part of the garden with heavy clay soil. It did struggle at first and the first few crops we got were small and very sour, but then I started mulching the three with my guinea pigs wood shavings and wood pellets from the cat's box... Suddenly the tree produced the most amazing fruit - just the right balance between sweet and tart. Too good to cook with. Unfortunately one year it carried so much that the tree snapped in half during a storm! The smallest apples were the size of golf balls, the biggest the size of baseballs if not bigger. Never dry or mealy textured. Best enjoyed fresh but did once make an absolutely amazing crumble with it. Make sure that you look after the tree when it's young, water regularly and don't let it go to fruit in the first few years as it will put a lot of strain on the tree. Prune properly but not heavily.

  • Apple - Redfree

    11 Jun 2025 
    They are not the best keepers, but their unique fresh, sweet taste is unmistakenable and unique among apples. You can kind of taste the crabapple parentage in them. Every year I anticipate biting into one, crisp and juicy straight off the tree in the time from late August to mid September. Yes, they get soft-fleshed in storage, where you keep eating them until how they were right off the tree is a memory to anticipate for next year. The other crazy thing about them is that in storage, where skin waxes up--all apples do this to some extent, but the Red Free produces a lot of this wax in trying its best to let it keep a bit longer. Can never pick them as red as in the photo--there is a kind of woodpecker that pecks up the largest, reddest, sweetest of them. I am told that this bird doesn't eat the apple, rather, it wants to attract insects that are its protein serving.

  • Apple - Jazz

    06 Jun 2025 
    This is the only apple aside from Granny Smith (for cooking) I would ever consider buying from a supermarket. It has set the standard. Even the not so great specimens are still a nice experience. When you get a good one though... it is as good as the best garden grown dessert apple.

  • Apple - Ashmead's Kernel

    04 Jun 2025 
    I have Ashmere Colonel growing in my backyard. The first tree is just produced one apple after four years I live in Northern Virginia. It’s amazing.

Latest spring blossom records from registered fruit trees

Find out how to record your blossom dates in our Fruit Tree Register.