We are Gloucestershire’s Orchard Charity.

We work in partnership with landowners to help maintain old orchards and to plant new ones, and in doing so help to spread knowledge about orchards and expertise in how to manage them.

We maintain valuable collections of Gloucestershire’s fruit varieties, many of them rare, to ensure their survival and work with other organisations to identify them formally through DNA analysis.

We are a wholly volunteer-run organisation and rely on the contributions of our members and supporters to achieve all that we do. We run various courses and events to encourage wider participation in our activities and invite you to join us in the celebration and conservation of Gloucestershire’s orchards.

Why orchards are important

Traditional orchards have unique ecological, genetic, heritage and landscape value that we need to conserve and celebrate. Changes in agriculture and in the way supermarkets buy and sell fruit have meant that Gloucestershire has lost over 70% of its orchards in the past 50 or so years and what was once a familiar part of the landscape is now increasingly rare.

The Gloucestershire Orchard Trust has played a leading role in arresting and reversing this decline and its Trustees and Supporters are passionate about saving our orchards, about planting new orchards, about raising the awareness of Gloucestershire’s fruit-growing heritage, about protecting this vital feature of our landscape and about conserving the genetic characteristics of fruit cultivars that come from the county – that’s over 80 varieties of apple, 120 varieties of perry pear, 15 varieties of plum.