We the French have this say,
La valeur n’attend pas le nombre des années,
i.e., merits can outnumber one’s years. Childhood is a modern, basically a nineteenth-century devised concept and invention. The historian Philippe Ariès deserves the credit for
reminding us of this late development in the history of mankind.
The strawberry story is a good illustration. We owe their cultivation to a young man. This was in the eighteenth century and at Versailles, where he had been hired as a gardener to the King, Louis
XV.
He was Antoine-Nicolas Duchesne (1747-1827). The date was July 5 1765, when he presented the King with the very first cultivated strawberry. He was then only 18. He had established a notable collection of strawberries in the botanical garden of the Petit Trianon
— that Marie-Antoinette would later abolish in her dimwitted mind — and was the first to document the separation of sexes in wild strawberry and the hybrid origin of the garden strawberry . Duchesne crossed the French wild strawberry with a Chilean cultivar — independent strains of Fragaria in the Old World and the New World — brought back by the spy and explorer Amédée-François Frézier (1682-1773), a remarkable man too, himself very smart and enterprising.
The Latin name of the genus, Fragaria, stems from the fragrance of strawberries. They are not fruits, however, nor berries. They are the containers of the ovaries.
Wild strawberries owe their fragrance to no fewer than 78 volatile chemicals, including 25 alcohols and 25 esters. Among the latter, methyl anthranilate and ethyl butyrate give for instance Mara des bois their delightful taste.