The Latin name of the genus is a cognate of fraga, which was how Romans named this delicacy, for its fragrance — a cognate; it still endures in the French name, fraise. The title of this piece echoes that, in English, of the masterpiece 1957 movie by Ingmar Bergman Wild Strawberries.
Interestingly, the plant is unrelated to straw and the reference to berries is equally misleading. The accurate relationship is not to straw but to ＂strewn ＂ since wild strawberries, seem to be strewn all over the usually grassy patch where they grow. As for the pink or red fruit, most people find highly covetable, it is actually neither a berry nor a fruit. The utterly delicious fleshy part is derived not from the plant’s ovaries, as it would be if a fruit, but from the container for the ovaries. In addition, what most people construe as
seeds on its surface are not seeds, but so-called akenes, i.e., a dry fruit containing a single seed. Moreover, strawberry plants do not reproduce primarily from seeds, they also propagate themselves with runners — known technically as stolons — but the seeds are viable and do establish new populations.
A personal recollection is appropriate here : about 20 years ago, Valerie my wife brought back from a walk a small number of wild strawberry plants and re-planted them in our garden. Within a relatively short time, a couple of years say, they threatened to take over the whole garden — they do show a most impressive spreading potential.
In like manner, there are very many varieties of strawberry plants : 106 species and at least 600 cultivars. A cultivar attempted a start in existence in Brittany about 1750 : we owe the introduction of this plant to the explorer and botanist Amédée-François Frézier (1682-1773), who brought it back from Chile and transplanted it into the mild climate of the peninsula around Plougastel. As an aside, his family name — Frézier in French sounds very much like fraisier — may have predestined him to such a pioneering action.
The “Chilean Strawberry” (Fragaria chiloensis) boasted superior size and flavor and was brought to Europe in 1712. F. chiloensis is native to western North America and South America. Unfortunately and unknown to the Europeans, it was sterile in its novel European location. F. chiloensis plants can be staminate (male), pistillate (female) and hermaphrodite (bisexual). Only pistillate plants were sent to France so they were unable to bear fruit because they required cross-pollination.
One Chilian plant had been given to M. de Jussieu (1686-1758) of the Jardin du Roi in Paris. It is likely that the plants in Paris and Versailles had never borne fruit, as had been observed in other European gardens (Boerhaave 1720, Dillenius 1732).
Thanks to his extensive knowledge of strawberry plants, a student of Jussieu, Antoine Nicolas Duchesne — more on him below — recognized the plant as female. The dioecious character, i.e. the existence of distinct male and female plants in a population, was well known to Duchesne from his research on F. moschata. Therefore, to allow pollination he planted a male plant of F. moschata next to F. chiloensis. Soon after, the receptacles of the
female plant started to swell. By the beginning of July, a mature and well-formed fruit had developed and others followed. It is said that on July 6, 1765 Duchesne was allowed to present the fruit-bearing plant to King Louis XV.
The king had a great passion for the gardens of the Trianon and was very fond of strawberries. The interspecific hybrid (F. virginiana x F. chiloensis) was named F. ananassa. This new strawberry was called “Pineapple Strawberry” because it smelled and tasted a bit like pineapple.
Our knowledge of the episode and, more generally, of strawberries originates in a most remarkable monographic treatise on strawberries, published in Paris in 1766. Its title is Histoire Naturelle des Fraisiers Contenant les Vues d’économie Réunies à la Botanique et Suivie de Remarques Particulières sur Plusieurs Points qui ont Rapport à l’Histoire
Naturelle Générale. It remains to this day a detailed and comprehensive book
on its topic.
Its author, the already referred-to Duchesne, is also a truly remarkable
figure. He was a botanist and hortoculturalist, who worked in the gardens at
Versailles, when Louis XV was king. More precisely, he was active in the
section at Trianon, where plants were being studied and cultivated next to
small signs bearing their names as a species — unfortunately, Marie-
Antoinette (1755-1793) when she elected to live at the Trianon in 1775 had
this botanical garden destroyed.
This botanist, a correspondent of Carl von Linnaeus (1707-1778) was
named Antoine Nicolas Duchesne (1747-1827). Yes, he was only 19 when he
published his monumental and most accurate treatise. Fortunately, the
Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris still holds 62 engraved drawings
of strawberry plants by Duchesne, who was also a gifted draughtsman.
Strawberries also possess biological properties, including antioxidant,
antimicrobial, or anti-inflammatory effects.