Once upon a time, on the magical Midsummer Day (the summer solstice), a woman with a baby went picking strawberries. By nightfall she realized that the more berries she gathered, the more there were. After a while, she came upon a cave and entered it, carrying her baby. Inside lay mounds of gold. The three maidens of the cave allowed her to remove as much gold as she carry in one armful. But the woman became greedy, grabbed three armfuls of gold, and fled out of the cave, leaving the baby behind. Suddenly, the entrance shut behind her, and a voice called out, warning her that she couldn’t reclaim the infant for another year.
On the next summer solstice, she was overjoyed to find the cave entrance open again. Inside, her child was waiting for her with a rosy apple in his hand. This time, she ignored the treasure and rushed to her child. The maidens of the cave, seeing how love had triumphed over greed, let them both go.
Strawberries grow where there’s lots of sun: in meadows, fields, on moist ground, along the edge of woods, and on hillsides. You can find them across the U.S.
There are no poisonous plants that resemble strawberries, but there's a related edible plant called the wood strawberry with yellow flowers, and a similar fruit surrounded by hairy sepals (modified leaves), that has no flavor.
Description:
Herbaceous plant with small, white, 5-petaled flower, 3-parted leaf, and familiar fruit; flower white, radially-symmetrical, 5 petals, 1/2 to 1 inch broad, on separate flower stalk; fruit drooping on long, slender, stalk, much smaller than commercial strawberry, with 10 tiny, green sepals cupping the base; leaf on separate stalk, 3-parted palmate-compound, with large, even teeth, leaflets long-oval, 2-3 inches long; plant 2-6 inches tall, spreading by long, slender, scaly, horizontal runners.
Earls, dukes, princes, and marquises used the common strawberry’s beautifully-shaped 3-parted, evenly-toothed compound leaves as emblems on the crowns. Poison ivy also with three leaflets, lacks the even teeth.
The white strawberry flower, which ripens early in spring, grows up to one inch across, with five symmetrical petals.
Flowers and leaves grow separately on long, slender stalks.
With milk-white flowers, whence soon shall sweet
Rich fruitage, to the taste and smell
Pleasant alike, the Strawberry weaves
Its coronet of three-fold leaves,
In mazes through the sloping wood.
—Anonymous
This fruit shows an exception to nature’s rules. The seeds, which grow on the outside of the fruit, are often sterile—they usually don’t grow into new plants. Strawberries usually spread vegetatively, by runners. The fruit is a only a vestige (left-over) of an ancestor that did spread by seeds, although gardeners have propogated this plant using seeds. Runners gradually became so successful and important that varieties that wasted too much energy reproducing by seeds died out. The reason we can eat strawberries is that the genes (programming units) that instruct the plant to make the marginally functional flowers and fruit still exist. {Note to educators: This is a good time to introduce genetics, inheritance, and contemporary issues of biotechnology.}
A flavorsome Berrie used to treat patients recovering from serious illness in their convalescence.
