Yesterday I ate my first Wild Strawberries of the year and they were delicious. Sorry, I would have shared some with you, but there were only a handful and they’ve all gone now. But there will be more soon.
The fruits of the Wild Strawberry are a treat at this time of year and have a concentrated flavour that makes up for their small size. (I would describe it as concentrated strawberry with a slight hint of bubblegum.) The plants don’t flower and fruit all at once, either, so you can keep going back for more.
Both photographs on this page were taken on 6th June 2019 – the ripe fruit, which I picked, was from a sunnier part of the garden than the plants that were in flower.
Wild Strawberry, Fragaria vesca, is a low growing perennial herb that can be found throughout the British Isles. It is also native throughout Europe and in Western Asia, and has been introduced to other parts of the world, such as the Eastern United States and parts of Africa and Eastern Asia. It is a member of the Rosaceae (the Rose family), and has the typical showy flowers of many family members, with five white petals, five sepals and many spirally arranged stamens.
Wild Strawberries like to grow in fairly dry places in the UK, in woodland, hedgerows, amongst scrub and on basic rock outcrops and screes. Manmade habitats include the floors of quarries and old railway embankments.
Wild Strawberries spread by seed but also by their stolons, stems which grow just above the surface of the soil, producing new plants at the nodes. (Cultivated strawberries have them too and we usually call them runners and use them to propagate more strawberry plants.)
The “berry” part of the name is not strictly accurate. The fleshy part of a strawberry is actually the swollen receptacle of the flower and each “seed” on the outside of the strawberry is an achene, a dry fruit which contains the seed (note 1).
It is a treat to find Wild Strawberries in the countryside and I remember stopping at the roadside near Trollhättan in Sweden, while on a cycle touring holiday, to snack on the fruit. (It’s best to avoid fruit at ground level near a well used path, in case of canine contamination.)
Wild Strawberry fruit are eaten by a variety of mammals and birds and the leaves are sometimes eaten by deer. Fragaria vesca is also one of several foodplants of the caterpillar of the Grizzled Skipper butterfly.
For a more reliable supply of fruit, Wild Strawberries are a lovely plant to grow in a garden, where they prefer (the mythical) moist but well drained soil, ideally slightly alkaline.
In 1992 I bought a couple of Wild Strawberry plants in a pot from Natural Surroundings and planted them in our previous garden, where they soon spread. I transferred some to our allotment, where they grew as groundcover under a Kentish Cobnut tree. I brought some to our current garden when we moved house.
We have rather dry, sandy soil in the garden and on the allotment, which can be a problem in very dry summers (note 2). Most of the allotment plants died off in the summer of 2006. In the current garden, I planted Wild Strawberries in a partly shaded border but they were mostly bullied out by Sweet Woodruff. However, they found an ideal growing spot in gravel under a bench. In the sunniest places, some of the leaves went a bit crispy last summer but the plants revived and are now doing well. The fruit is better in sun but the plants survive drought better in shade, so it’s a good idea to let the plants spread around and some should always thrive. Wild Strawberries also look good trailing from containers, as long as you keep them watered in summer: add some composted bark to a peat free potting compost.
Fragaria vesca is also known as the Alpine Strawberry, Mountain Strawberry or Wood Strawberry. There are several cultivars, including ‘Alexandria’ (which doesn’t have runners) and the more refined ‘Mara des Bois’ (with larger fruit, developed in France in the 1990s). We grew both of these in the early days of Grapes Hill Community Garden, along with the wild form. They all tasted good, but the wild form did much better in the droughty conditions beneath shallow rooted Ash trees.
I also grow the Plymouth Strawberry, Fragaria vesca var. ‘muricata‘. Its flowers are green and leafy and the fruits are covered in spines. The plants seem less vigorous than the wild type. I grow it purely as a curiosity, in a different part of the garden, so the two varieties don’t mix.
The most obvious use of Wild Strawberries is to eat their fruit. However, the fresh or dried leaves can be used to make tea. Jekka McVicar (note 3) suggests adding the mashed fruit to facepacks to whiten skin and lighten freckles or applying cut strawberries to ease slight sunburn. (“If you get bored you can always eat them”.) If you have sore gums or mouth ulcers, the leaves can be used to make a gargle and mouthwash.
Wikipedia lists some of the phytochemicals found in strawberries (the cultivated hybrids, rather than Fragaria vesca, but the compounds should be similar for Fragaria vesca), including a long list of chemicals that give the fruit its characteristic fragrance. Strawberries are a good source of Vitamin C and manganese. However, a small percentage of people are allergic to them.
Larger, cultivated strawberries are not just highly bred Fragararia vesca. They are Fragaria x ananassa, a cross of Fragaria virginiana (Virginia Strawberry), from eastern North America, and Fragaria chiloensis (Chilean Strawberry), from Chile. The parents grow in totally separate parts of the world and the hybrid was produced in Brittany (Bretagne) in the 1750s. Wikipedia provides a good account of strawberry cultivation throughout the world: in 2016, world production of strawberries was 9.2 million tonnes. I grow cultivated strawberries on the allotment. Like Fragaria vesca, they suffer in drought on light soil in full sun, but I always get a decent crop of fruit, which have a lovely flavour. Nowadays, commercially grown strawberries can be as good, but in the past I have eaten large, bland and disappointing fruit from irrigated, over-pampered plants.
One other possible source of disappointment is to confuse Barren Strawberry for Wild Strawberry. Barren Strawberry, Potentilla sterilis, is a relative of Fragaria vesca, and a lovely plant in its own right. It is superficially quite similar but there is no point in looking for tasty red fruit. Barren Strawberry has only has small, hard achenes and is “quite un-strawberry like both in flavour and texture“.
The leaves of both plants have three leaflets but Barren Strawberry leaves are much less glossy and have fewer teeth and it is only half the height of Wild Strawberry. Barren Strawberry flowers earlier in the year than Wild Strawberry (February to April, rather than April to July) and the flower petals are notched and widely separated. The Wild Flower Finder website has good photographs of both Potentilla sterilis and Fragaria vesca.
Although cultivated strawberries are sometimes grown on straw, which stops soil splashing onto the fruit, this isn’t how the name is thought to have arisen. In Anglo-Saxon “straw” meant small pieces of chaff, referring to the achenes (pips) on the outside of the fruit (note 3). Fragaria is from the Latin word for strawberry, related to fragrans, meaning fragrant. Vesca comes from the Latin for small or thin.
Notes
Note 1 – If you thought this was complicated, I suggest you read my post about nuts from December 2012.
Note 2 – At Noar Hill in Hampshire, the Wild Strawberries frizzled up in the 1976 drought, leading to extinction of the Grizzled Skipper colony there. Matthew Oates (2015), “In Pursuit of Butterflies: A Fifty Year Affair“, Bloomsbury, London. Page 99.
I was a bit worried that this might have happened in the summer of 2018 at Stoke Ferry Cut-off Channel, one of Norfolk’s two remaining sites for Grizzled Skipper, but I’m glad to say that the butterflies were alive and well this spring, and Wild Strawberry was still growing there.
Note 3 – Jekka McVicar (2009), “Jekka’s Complete Herb Book“, RHS, London. Pages 114 and 115.
