Nature Notes – Strawberries (Wild, Barren and Garden) by Ian Brand

Visit a supermarket in winter or summer, and the range of fresh fruit and vegetables will be almost identical. I rather miss the seasonality of food from my childhood. I remember enthusiastically waiting for chits of Guernsey ‘toms’ to arrive in the local greengrocer or the first of the summer strawberries or raspberries. The use of polytunnels has extended the growing season in the UK, and what cannot be grown here in winter is flown or shipped from around the world.

This is why I like to indulge in a little foraging. Those edible hedgerow treats are often only available for just a few weeks. Wild strawberries are a good example, producing small, sweet, edible fruits. The seeds stand proud, in comparison to the cultivated commercial strawberry where the seeds are sunk into the fruit’s surface.

However, not all the strawberry plants growing in our countryside will produce edible berries. This is because here in the UK we have two native species. Barren strawberry (Potentilla sterilis), which only produces the seeds or achenes and no juicy red flesh and the wild strawberry (Fragaria vesca) which does. The two species look similar and can be difficult to tell apart. Barren strawberries are the first to flower from February to May, the wild strawberry flowering later in April to June. Both have five white petals, with five green sepals beneath and a plethora of central yellow stamens. Take a closer look, and the earlier flowering barren strawberry has small white petals in-between which the longer green sepals can be clearly seen, while wild strawberries are like the cultivated garden plant, with overlapping larger white petals thereby obscuring the underlying sepals.

If the plant you are looking at doesn’t have any flowers, look at the leaf tips to tell them apart. The terminal tooth of the barren plant is shorter than its neighbours, and in the wild strawberry it’s longer.

Finally, back to those supermarket strawberries, which you might think are as English as clotted cream and Wimbledon, but you’d be mistaken. Virginia strawberries were brought to Europe from North America during the 16th century. They were deliciously sweet but small. It was only when this strawberry was crossed with the large-fruited but tasteless Chilean strawberry (brought back to France in 1712) that the modern strawberry (Fragaria annassa) was born. Since then, here in the UK, we have made it our own, with 600 varieties or cultivars now grown.

PLEASE NOTE: As always when foraging, make sure to correctly identify the plants and please forage sustainably.  For example, the National Trust offer some guidelines: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/who-we-are/about-us/our-policy-on-foraging-for-wild-food