Pomona was the goddess of orchard fruit (her name from poma, "fruits of the tree"), particularly of apples, pears, and cultivated stone-fruits — distinct from Ceres (whose province was grain) and from the wilder vegetation-deities. She was a small goddess with a small cult, but she had a flamen of her own (the Flamen Pomonalis, the fifteenth and lowest-ranked of the flamines, but a flamen nonetheless), which suggests considerable antiquity. Her cult was located in a sacred grove called the Pomonal, somewhere on the road from Rome to Ostia (the precise site has not been recovered).

Her one notable narrative, preserved by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, is the wooing by Vertumnus (treated next). Pomona, devoted to her orchards, refused all suitors. Vertumnus, the Roman god of seasonal change, fell in love with her and approached her in many disguises — as a reaper, a plowman, a vine-pruner, a soldier — but always failing to win her. At last he came as an old woman, who praised the matching of vine and elm in the orchard (with its allegorical lesson) and praised the merits of Vertumnus by name; then, at the speech's climax, the disguise was thrown off and Vertumnus stood in his true form. Pomona, charmed at last, accepted him. The tale is of Hellenistic literary inspiration rather than indigenous Italic mythology — Ovid is here borrowing the Greek pattern of the wooing-narrative — but it gave Pomona her one well-known story and remains the principal narrative her name attaches to.