ALSO KNOWN AS: Virginia wild strawberry, Tehim (Lenape)
How to know:
Small highly toothed leaves
Stems and leaves sprawl along ground, not six inches high
Small hairs everywhere
Flowers range from white to light pink.
In Ojibway mythology the strawberry stands in the space between the living and the dead. Once a passing soul has eaten the strawberry in those in between lands they forget the world of the living. They move on. There are not many things on this earth that give themselves so easily over with sweetness. Some you have to prepare for, to wait for, to crack open. Even the raspberry and the blackberry have a tang. The fresh blueberry has a cloudlike taste, like a cool mountain morning.
But the wild strawberry’s flavor doesn’t give itself over to complexity or simile.
A Fruit Unlike Any Other
The word Strawberry is derived from the Old English streawberige, which literally means “straw” though the reason why is debated. One version is that its runners look like straw. Another is that seeds on the exterior look like wheat chaff. The name could also connote its quality of care: it grows from straw mulch. As spring berries they drink in those cool first rains and fruit when the sun comes out in June. They require sunny days and cool nights. Their shallow root systems, can easily dry out if the sun is too strong or if the air is too dry. They need six to ten hours of sun each day. So they grow in clearings and meadows, usually where shade is dappled. A mother strawberry plant is perennial and will regrow for four and five years.
They need slightly acidic soil. A single main plant will let out runners, or stolons, and the plants that grow on those runners are called strawberry daughters. They often create colonies in this way, though they haven’t been known to behave invasively and give space for other plants to grow, even when they are not native to the habitat. Their three leaves are jagged and lined with tiny hairs, or trichomes, that spread to their stems.
the strawberry is different from the fruit with star shapes like the apple or the pear, or even the papaya or grapefruit where the seed is contained in a single fruit. A fruit is, in fact, the ovary of the plant. Strawberries are unique in that their seeds appear to be lining the outside like the buttons on a tight coat. But this is an illusion. In fact, the true fruits of the strawberry are the hundreds of embedded buttons on the red outer layer of skin. The strawberry itself is adorned with fruits, whose technical term is achene.
Each seed is surrounded by its own little ovary.
Look closely at the tiny flowers and see that they are cousins of roses. They look similar, with a wreath of showy stamens and a star of petals that can range from soft pink to white. They are in the Rosaceae family. There are male and female strawberries, so they farmers plant the male and female next to one another.
Aside from being delicious, strawberries are incredibly healthy. They are high in vitamin C which helps in removing cancerous cells and wound healing. The redness of the berry is the same chemical that dons the autumn leaves, half a year later: anthocynins, which are an indicator for antioxidants. So the deeper the red, the more antioxidants are present. Antioxidants safeguard cells and lower inflammation. The berries also help with lowering blood pressure. Strawberries are also high in potassium and folic acid.
A Global Commodity: Strawberry’s Disconnect from Intimacy
There are about twenty varieties of strawberries that span the globe. All of them look very similar and carry the name Fragaria. The Virgiania strawberry is a species, though not the only one, that is native to North America. It is a small rounded berry that is celebrated for its sweetness. Strawberry varieties span the entire northern hemisphere. Because they grow so generously and abundantly they were not cultivated seriously until the 19th century.
Lately, the only straw close to a cultivated strawberry is the occasional straw hat of a worker, whose hands have traveled from the south of the border, whose hands often hold the story of surviving a long and dangerous road, whose hands facilitate the transportation of produce from the ground to the store.
These wild strawberries are the wild ancestor of cultivated strawberries which are an engine behind Californian economy, all of which are prepared, planted, and picked by migrant workers from Mexico and South America in the Santa Maria valley. These workers are often paid off the books, and since many do not have their papers growers can pay less than minimum wage, long hours, and impoverished living situations. Strawberry workers are the lowest paid worker in the United States. The strawberry’s popularity, precarity, the loss of farmland and climate change have exacerbated the situation leading to worker strikes. Though many of these issues remain.
Strawberry seed can grow nearly anywhere it is dropped, as long as it has its share of water, the cultivated strawberry must be handpicked. And while strawberries survive in many soil types, they need consistent water and they are vulnerable to diseases. Because of the strawberry’s resistance to large farming operations, it’s common for strawberry fields and plants to be sprayed with disinfectants, this past year, nonorganic strawberries had some of disinfectants of all fruits and vegetables on the market. Just because strawberries require touch and a discerning eye, does not mean that they should be picked faster and by hands made invisible by system injustices.
I would hope we cultivate more love around the strawberry, which is the essence of its ethnobotanical identity.
The mythology around strawberries encompasses true love and fertility, a simultaneous love and strength wound within their growth patterns and reflected in the mythology about them, growing, as they do, like small hearts on the sleeve of the earth separating the clearings from the forest. The arrival of strawberry season is like a threshold to summer. They have been associated with goddesses of love. They are tears of Aphrodite mixed with blood of Adonis, they are favorites of faeries who pluck the berries from the horns of cattle in the summer, so the animals are protected. They are emblems of adoration.
The strawberry is loved by more than humans. Mice and opossums, box turtles, and chipmunks will collect the strawberries during their short, no more than gracious month-long season.
May the strawberry keep the memory of spring while opening a hand to summer. May they always be easy for a child’s eye to find. Once we know what they look like you can’t unsee the little red dot in seas of meadow’s green. And when it is time to walk into that great forest, may we pick a strawberry to lace sweetness into the shadows as we go.
myth for strawberry
Forager Friendly?
Yes, one thousand times yes.
I would challenge the reader to save their strawberry seeds, try replanting them!
Not to be confused with mock strawberries. They look almost exactly the same but mock strawberries behave invasively. They have very similar fruiting bodies, but they have yellow flowers.
Or bloodroot that has showy white flowers early in the season. But these are mostly woodland plants, and they usually appear a few weeks before the strawberry flower.
Sources
https://www.almanac.com/plant/strawberries
https://www.britannica.com/plant/strawberry
https://marblecrowblog.com/2022/04/27/strawberry-folklore-and-magical-properties/
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/benefits-of-strawberries
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4Go05YYS7s
Dictionary of Symbols. Chevalier, Jean, Gheerbrant. Trans. Buchanan-Brown, John. Penguin Reference. 1994.
https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/blueberries-strawberries-again-on-the-dirty-dozen-list/
The No Sweat Nature Podcast. Mason Flair, Charlotte. Episode 35: “Strawberries”. https://open.spotify.com/episode/0Sq7zrMNv5KGsrezcclsqU
https://www.krcu.org/2020-05-04/discover-nature-wild-strawberries
https://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=frvi
(highly recommend these articles about strawberry laborers in California):
https://civileats.com/2024/04/24/strawberry-farmworkers-fight-for-a-living-wage/