1000 apple cultivars for the corpora project
The incredible botmaster Darius Kazemi has a popular GitHub repository called “corpora“, which contains, well, collections of all kinds of things. It can be really handy to have access to a list of words that all fall into a certain group, and so Kazemi makes it available completely freely and with a CC0 waiver to place it in the public domain.
Earlier this week I landed my first contribution to corpora: a collection of 1000 apple varieties, or cultivars, picked from the metadata of the USDA Pomological Watercolor collection. They are roughly the 1000 that appear most frequently out of 1500 or so, though a good chunk (200 or so of this corpus, and 700 or so of the overall collection) appear only once.
The names on the list are charming and goofy, and I hope they are useful to somebody. Here are some of my favorite cultivars:
- Newtown Spitzenburg
- Shiawassee
- White Winter Pearmain
- Royal Limbertwig
- Sops of Wine
- Peasgood Nonesuch
- Limber Limb Pippin
- Hollandberry Admirable
- Petite Douce Rousse
- Russian Gravenstein
- Sweet Nonesuch
It feels like a good way of extending the pomological watercolor work I’ve been doing into a community of artists and botmakers I’d like to support.