Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did,"
William Butler remarked about the strawberry and Izaak Walton promptly quoted
the sentiment in The Complete Angler, immortalizing it for posterity. Butler was
given to excesses - he started the old fishwive's tale that it's dangerous to
eat oysters during months without an "R" in them - yet concerning the strawberry
the old gastronome hardly exaggerated. Not only is this member of the rose
family "the very primrose of fruits, announcing the season has opened again," as
another gardener put it, but it is more widely esteemed for its flavor than any
other fruit, and it is the most commonly grown fruit in the home garden.
Strawberries will grow almost everywhere throughout the world, need little room,
multiply themselves each year by producing "daughter plants," have no thorns as
so many small fruits do, need no trellises and supports, and can produce good
crops without spraying because they bear their fruit be fore pests get a good
start in the garden. About their only defect, in the words of Dr. George M.
Darrow, former chief horticulturist of the USDA, is that "the modern American
back does not seem to have adapted itself to strawberry picking."
The romantic history of the strawberry goes back to the Greeks and Romans. The
early Greeks had a taboo against eating any red foods, including wild
strawberries, and this added mystery to the fruit, leading many to believe it
possessed great powers. Though mentioned in the writings of Virgil, Ovid, and
Pliny, the plant began to be cultivated only in the Middle Ages, so far as is
known. Some wild beliefs were associated with it. Pregnant women, for example,
avoided strawberries because they believed their children would be born with
strawberry marks (small, slightly raised birthmarks resembling strawberries) if
they partook of the fruit. On the other hand, strawberries were considered to be
a medicinal cure for almost everything. It was even thought that a lotion made
of their roots could fasten loose teeth by strengthening the gums.
The strawberry of the Middle Ages, often portrayed in Gothic art, was the little
wild, or woods, strawberry, the fraise des bois (Fragaria vesca) of the French,
that sends out no runners and is much esteemed for its taste. The gardeners of
Henry VIII collected roots of this type from the woods to plant in the royal
gardens, and it is said that Cardinal Wolsey introduced the English to wild
strawberries and cream. Strawberry leaves symbolize the rank of a duke, which
indicates how highly the berries were regarded. Several theories have been
proposed about the origin of the name strawberry itself, but none is convincing.
Some say the straw mulch often used in its cultivation inspired the name, some
hold that the achenes with which the berry's surface is dotted resemble straw,
others claim that the dried berries were once strung on strands of straw for
decorations, while still others say that the long, strawlike runners of the
mother plant (strawlike when dry) gave the fruit its name. The mysterious word
was used as early as A.D. 1000 in England and doesn't derive from any other
language. It may be that the straw in strawberry is a corruption of the word
strew. Certainly the mother plant strews or scatters new plants all over a patch
when it propagates itself by sending out runners, and the fruit is strewn among
the leaves on the plant itself.
In America, Indians collected and even cultivated the North American wild
strawberry, Fragaria virginiana, which is much bigger than its wild European
counterpart. Roger Williams, who founded Providence, Rhode Island, in 1636,
wrote that the strawberry was "the wonder of all the Fruits growing naturally in
these parts. The Indians bruise them in a Mortar, and mix them with meal and
make strawberry bread." A New Amsterdam settler wrote that "the flat land near
the river is covered with strawberries, which grow so plentifully in the fields
that one can lie down and eat them." For their part, the Indians liked the
berries simply sweetened "with the dew of milkweed." But the colonists, to their
everlasting credit, invented that old American favorite strawberry shortcake,
the largest of which is baked today at the annual Lebanon, Oregon, strawberry
festival, where a huge cake towering over twelve feet in the air is cut with a
two man saw every year.
A real life espionage thriller marked the beginning of the strawberry as we know
it today. As early as 1624 the larger wild American strawberry had been sent to
France for cross breeding with the European wild strawberry. But real progress
in producing the big modern varieties began when Captain Frazier, a French
explorer spy, was observing Spanish fortifications on the west coast of South
America and noticed the giant fruited but tough Chilean wild beach strawberry,
Fragaria chiloensis, which native Indians had been cultivating for centuries. On
completing his mission, Frazier dug up five plants and brought them back to
France. He claimed that they bore fruits "as large as walnuts," but no one could
tell at first, for although he was an amateur botanist who should have known
better, the captain had selected only female plants with no males to pollinate
them. This was remedied by planting the Chilean species next to American types,
and eventually the big pineapple strawberry (Fragaria ananassa) was crossbred
from the two.
All strawberries came to be named Fraisiers in French in honor of Frazier, but
another Frenchman, botanist Antoine Nicholas Duchesne, had more to do with the
fruit's development. Duchesne, in 1764, at the age of seventeen, presented Louis
XV with a potted plant laden with ripe strawberries, winning favor with the
king, and his book L'Histoire des Fraisiers later became a classic. Among
Europeans only the eccentric English horticulturist Thomas Andrew Knight
surpassed him in strawberry expertise. Knight was the first grower to practice
large-scale, systematic strawberry breeding, and his work with the pineapple
strawberry marked the beginnings of the big, sweet strawberries grown today.
Many Americans had a hand in developing the modern strawberry. Our earliest
breeder of note was bearded Charles Mason Hovey, a Cambridge, Massachusetts,
nurseryman and publisher of a horticultural magazine who in 1834 originated the
first fruit variety cross of any kind made by an American. Another pioneer was
New Yorker James Wilson, whose 1851 Wilson strawberry variety enabled commercial
acreage to jump from a few thousand to over 100,000 acres within thirty years.
Others who contributed much to native strawberry development included growers as
varied as a dry goods merchant, a Louisiana railroad station agent, a housewife,
and a mountain homesteader. Henry A. Wallace, America's thirty third vice
president, was a respected experimental grower who developed a great many
delicious varieties.
It is a tribute to American ingenuity that of the 130,000 acres devoted to
commercial strawberries here, a mere 8,000 acres in California planted with the
Shasta and Lassen varieties account for a quarter of the world's crop. But mass
produced strawberries, though they are being bred more and more for flavor, are
usually varieties that are grown because they are "firm" (read "tough") and ship
well. They are also picked before they ripen, and while strawberries do gain
color off the plant, they cannot develop any more flavor after being picked and
invariably lose in vitamin content after two days. Many growers, too, aren't
above putting a few choice berries atop a box and filling the rest with small or
rotten berries. This practice, incidentally, dates back at least to 1624 when
Francis Bacon wrote of "the strawberry wives, that laid two or three great
strawberries at the mouth of the pot, and all the rest were little ones." Almost
four centuries have passed and the strawberry buyer still must beware!
The best answer is still to grow strawberries at home, as Americans have
been doing since the 1700s. Types like Florida 90 (the berry usually found
in stores and restaurants during the winter) are good enough when you
can't grow your own, but why compromise with quality when it isn't
necessary" A Suwannee or a Fairfax, or almost any variety left to ripen in
the sun, is so much juicier and sweeter than a commercial berry (even
those bought at roadside stands) that it. tastes like another fruit
entirely, and as a bonus has stored up much more vitamin C because it was
stimulated by sunlight longer. Grow strawberries in patches, in borders,
or on the front lawn, grow them high up on a terrace in a strawberry
barrel or in a strawberry pyramid, try them in the greenhouse, in a common
planter, or in an old fashioned strawberry jar, even experiment with so
called "climbing types." (There are descriptions of all these techniques
further on.) But plant some strawberries this spring. Twenty-five plants -
which can produce from I to 5 quarts of berries apiece, depending on how
well they are grown - should be plenty for a family of four and could last
a lifetime if you keep developing their offspring. On the other hand, some
growers like to plant a 25 foot row of strawberry plants for each member
of the family, so that there's enough for preserves and freezing. If you
want to make some pin money growing the berries, figure it this way.
Commercial growers in California, using all the latest methods, harvest
50,000 quarts of berries from an acre. Do the same in a 33 x 66 foot home
strawberry patch, which is exactly one twentieth of an acre, and you can
harvest 2,500 quarts. Sell these at an average seventy cents a pint (home
berries should be worth even more) and you've made $3,500. Not bad for a
little plot of land and no more than a few days' work, even if you cut
these figures in half.