The garden strawberry was born by accident in an 18th-century Breton garden
When Amédée-François Frézier brought Chilean strawberry plants to France in 1714, they grew lush but gave no fruit. Gardeners in Brittany eventually noticed why: every plant was female. Planting pollen-bearing strawberries among them fixed that, and a chance cross with a North American species produced the fruit now sold worldwide.
Until the seventeenth century Europeans simply dug up woodland strawberries and multiplied them by pegging down runners. Then two American species arrived: the Virginia strawberry from eastern North America and the Chilean strawberry that Frézier carried from Chile. In the 1750s Breton growers set wild woodland plants among the barren Chilean ones to supply pollen, and the harvest came. The key hybrid, Fragaria × ananassa, was recorded by Philip Miller at Chelsea in 1759 as the pine strawberry, both names referring to a pineapple flavour. In 1766 Antoine Nicolas Duchesne, working at Versailles, showed it was a cross between the Chilean and Virginian species.
Botanically it is no berry. The flesh grows from the flower's receptacle, making it an aggregate accessory fruit, and each little seed on the surface is an achene, a separate fruit with its own seed. Those achenes weigh about 1 percent of the fruit yet hold 11 percent of its polyphenols. Cultivated strawberries and both parents are octoploid, carrying eight sets of seven chromosomes, and the genome was published in 2019. Of roughly 360 aroma compounds, 31 correlate strongly with pleasing flavour and scent.
Breeding kept improving yields. Michael Keens of Isleworth won a Royal Horticultural Society silver cup in 1806 for his Keens Imperial. Day-neutral cultivars, indifferent to day length, later let California's strawberry industry expand, and in 2024 the world grew 10.7 million tonnes, 38 percent of it in China. For people allergic to the ripening protein Fra a1, pale white-fruited varieties exist.
Strawberries also carry a long literary shadow. Virgil warned of a cold snake lurking beneath low strawberries, an image later writers used for any risky pleasure; in Othello, Desdemona's handkerchief is spotted with strawberries. Medieval painters placed them in the Virgin Mary's garden, and strawberries and cream became a fixture at Wimbledon.
Source: Strawberry
