Our Wild Strawberry

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Sixty years ago, in “The Illustrated  Strawberry Culturist,” Andrew S. Fuller chided Americans for doing nothing to improve our native strawberries until after English gardeners had imported American species for an experiment in the early 1800s. 

Even then, for perhaps a half century more, “our fruit growers were content to import varieties from abroad instead of attempting to raise new and more valuable ones at home.”

Wild StrawberryPin

Today, I suspect, Mr. Fuller would have less cause for complaint. Not a season goes by, it seems, but the University of Minnesota Fruit Breeding Farm and the University of California, to name but two, come forth with an improved variety, always larger, sweeter, and more prolific.

Yet, science notwithstanding, they cannot produce the equal of the little wild berry with which, as children, we stained so many shirts.

Fragrant Fragaria Virginiana

The elusive, uniquely sweet fragrance of our little Fragaria virginiana was hardly more than a memory when, shortly before the recent war, I visited hermit friends on Washington Island in the northwestern waters of Lake Michigan. 

Here, there were no berry “patches” at all; instead, the entire island was a strawberry patch, and you could not step from a road in early July without crushing hundreds of the bright-red fruits.

One day, we picked three quarts, a great labor which, unthinkably, would have earned us as much as 30 cents at the Island store.

It was a remembrance of those three quarts that led me to set out in my garden a small bed, not of Sierra or Streamliner, which have their places, but of our native wild berry. 

Probably it is Fragaria virginiana illinoensis, which likes rich soil, is larger in leaf and scape, and bears fruit lighter in hue than F. virginiana, although I am not sure. 

Freed of natural competition with grasses and other wild plants, my species’ berries have outdone themselves. 

While their unproved progeny loll on the ground, these wildwood fellows stand erect and hold their berries high above rain-spatter and nibbling birds.

If you have fond memories of threading wild strawberries on a hay stem or of staining a shirt or apron pocket and have a garden corner to spare, buy or beg or forage for a few wild plants of Fragaria virginiana. 

You will discover June has a meaning you had almost forgotten!

44659 by C Holway