“Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did.”—Dr. William Butler
Doctor Butler wrote this in the sixteenth century before our big hybrid strawberries had been developed. He had probably eaten the wild European woodland strawberry, Fragaria vesca, which the French call les fraises des bois, and is arguably the sweetest. Chef and writer David Lebovitz recalled transporting some when “the heady smell of the tiny wild strawberries in my car drove me nearly insane.”
Strawberries have been mentioned by the Roman poets Virgil and Ovid as far back as the first century but as ornamentals not food plants. In Europe there is another small fruited species, the musk strawberry, F.moschata, which grows on the edges of woods in Central Europe and has a flavor with hints of raspberries and pineapple. The twelfth century abbess, Saint Hildegard Von Binger, claimed that strawberries were unfit to eat as they grew close to the ground near snakes and toads. They were featured in medieval art where scholar Elizabeth Haight said that “it is the symbol of perfect righteousness.” And by 1597 the herbalist John Gerard wrote that they were good for “reviving the spirits and making the heart merry.”
When the colonists arrived in North America they encountered our wild strawberry, Fragaria virginiana, growing on open land, especially on burned soils. John Brereton found the berries on Martha’s Vineyard in 1602 and exclaimed that they were “red and white, as sweet and much bigger than ours in England.” In 1776 the botanist William Bartram rode his horse through a field of strawberries so dense and juicy that the horse’s legs were dyed red. He, and other plant collectors, sent samples back to Europe . Thomas Jefferson cultivated the tiny berries, his “Arcadian dainty” of which he claimed “one hundred fill half a pint.”
The key to the development of our large, modern berries is the species, Fragaria chiloensis, a beach strawberry native to the Pacific Northwest that showed up south on the shores of present day Chile where the Picunche and Mapuche people domesticated and developed larger berries. In 1714 Amedee Francois Frezier, a French spy and polymath, came upon the berries in the market. (An amusing fact is that his surname, referring to the French word for the berry, was granted to an ancestor after he had given the king a gift of strawberries). They were almost white and “as big as a walnut, and sometimes as a hen’s egg.” He returned to Europe with five live plants, all which had borne fruit. Unfortunately this species is dioecious; there are separate male and female plants and cross pollination is required to produce fruit and the five plants he returned with no longer were fertile. But the plants were shared with gardens throughout Europe and when grown near other strawberry species hybridization occurred naturally. It is the two New World species crossing that led to big, red berries. The new strawberry was dubbed Fragaria ananassa, the pineapple strawberry, because its smell resembled the pineapple. And as an added bonus, the plants are self-fertile.
In the United States in 1836 in Cambridge, Massachusetts Charles Hovey developed a berry the is the ancestor of most modern varieties. In the 1850s James Wilson of Albany, New York introduced bigger and firmer berries and a strawberry production boom began in the country. E. C. Howard do Belchertown made further improvements.
In France, in the Lot-et-Garonne area, local varieties of berries are being grown. ‘La Gariguette’,developed in 1970, is early. ‘La Charlotte’ ripens later. The berries are slightly smaller than ours and sweeter. In 1991 the small fruited everbearer ‘Mara des Bois’ was introduced with a flavor of the wild woodland berry.
In Japan strawberries have become a status symbol. The concept of ‘hatsumono’ or the first of the season, has led to production of strawberries in greenhouses during winter. Hundreds of dollars can be spent for one perfect berry as a special gift. Curiously, during the natural growing season, strawberries are imported to Japan.
Two recent developments in strawberry production are pine berries and pink-flowered plants, both everbearing. Pineberries are small fruit the size of an acorn, creamy white with dots of red seeds and a hint of pineapple in the taste. Berry production increases with cross pollination of other strawberry varieties. The pink-flowered plants have been marketed in hanging planters but do just as well or better, in the ground.
As alluded to in the title of my article, John Lennon’s trippy song of 1967 “Strawberry Fields Forever” has to be quoted. So without further ado here it is:
“Let me take you down
Cause I’m going to strawberry fields.
Nothing is real.
And nothing to get hung about.
Strawberry fields forever.”
And an added fact that pleases me is that the video for the song was filmed at Knole, the childhood home of Vita Sackville-West, creator of one of my favorite gardens, Sissinghurst.
But the last words belong to Clarice Lispector:
“But don’t forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes.”