A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1039 entries
wilding
A wilding is a plant that has grown from self-sown seed rather than being planted, and specifically a fruit tree grown from a pip, which will not come true to the parent and produces something new and usually sour. The old English orchard sense is a wild apple grown from seed. In New Zealand and Australia, the word has taken a second life for self-seeded conifers spreading out of plantations onto open country.
Etymology
The word is built on wild with the ending that makes a noun of a person or thing having that quality, the same one in weakling and nestling. It has been in English since the Middle Ages for a self-sown fruit tree, and the sense has broadened by ordinary extension rather than by any deliberate coinage.
Notes
Every named apple variety in the world began as a wilding, since apples do not breed true and a pip from a Bramley produces something else entirely, so every one of the several thousand named varieties is one seedling that somebody noticed and then propagated by grafting.