British Plants and Flowers – Wild Strawberry

Name –- The common and charming notion that the name Strawberry derives from the habit of placing straw under the cultivated plants when the berries ripening to keep off slugs and encourage the fruit to ripen equally all the way round is totally false because the name predates the straw-spreading custom, and preserves the obsolete present tense = 'straw' of the verb 'to strew,' referring to the tangle of vines with which the Strawberry covers the ground – in other words, the vines are a straw or tangle. The botanical name is Fragaria vesca.

Description - The wild strawberry is a delicate, thin-leaved plant, with small scarlet berries that are more cone-shaped than commercial strawberries.

Origin - The earliest mention of the strawberry in English, rather than Latin, writing is in a Saxon plant list of the tenth century, and in 1265 the 'Straberie' is mentioned in the household roll of the Countess of Leicester. The tiny delicious fruits appear in early summer – they have a much lower water content than commercially grown strawberries and unlike them, both the fruit and leaves are high in vitamin C. The strawberry is a useful dentifrice and cosmetic and the Elizabethans used the fresh fruit to get rid of discoloration of the teeth – they did this by squashing the fruits onto the teeth and leaving them there for about five minutes. It’s also claimed that a cut strawberry rubbed over the face immediately after washing it will whiten the skin and remove slight sunburn.

For Decoration – Wild strawberries are a charming woodland plant and fairly robust, meaning they'll grow around the trunk of a tree and in almost complete shade, although they do better if they receive a small amount of sunlight a day.

British plant strawberry photograph by audreyjm529, used under a creative commons attribution licence

 

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