| Description | Wild Strawberry (Fragaria virginiana) A native ground cover with white flowers producing an edible fruit. The fruit of the wild version of strawberry are much smaller than the cultivated types. |
|---|---|
| Plant Type | Wild Flowers, Edible Fruit, Site author's observations |
| Hardiness Zone | 4 |
| Sunlight | full, mostly sunny |
| Moisture | average, medium |
| Soil & Site | average, open woods, woods openings, fields |
| Temperature | grow best in the cooler part of the growing season |
| Flowers | white, white petals, can be: pistillate (female), staminate (male), or perfect (both male and female parts), forms umbel-like clusters |
| Fruit | red, called a berry but is really an aggregate fruit, and aggregate of pistils in one flower, tasty and edible |
| Leaves | three sharply toothed leaflets on top of a long pistil (trifoliate) originating from the crown |
| Stems | spreaders by red runners (stolons), can form a mat of foliage |
| Roots | originate from the crown, fibrous |
| Dimensions | can spread indefinitely by runners, 4-6 inches tall |
| Propagation | division, digging up plantlets |
| Misc Facts | Fragaria is from the Latin name for the strawberry and comes from fragrans which refers to the smell of the fruit. Species name refers to Virginia. AKA: Virginia Strawberry, Common Strawberry |
| Author's Notes | A grew up foraging for and eating countless numbers of this sweet/tart fruit. At one time it became an aggressive weed in one of my gardens. Crawly over and smothering other plants. No idea where the original plants came from. Probably bird doo doo. |
| Notes & Reference | #61-How to recognize Flowering Wild Plants (William Carey Grimm), #140-Prairie Plants of the UW Madison Arboretum (Theodore Cochrane, Kandis Elliot, Claudia Lipke), #153-Illinois Wild Flower (www.illinoiswildflowers.info) |
Cart
