Flowering Season - April-June.
Distribution - New Brunswick to the Gulf of Mexico, and westward
to Dakota.
"Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God
never did." Whether one is kneeling in the fields, gathering the
sun-kissed, fragrant, luscious, wet scarlet berries nodding among
the grass, or eating the huge cultivated fruit smothered with
sugar and cream, one fervently quotes Dr. Boteler with dear old
lzaak Walton. Shakespeare says : "My lord of Ely, when I was last
in Holborn, I saw good strawberries in your garden there." Is not
this the first reference to the strawberry under cultivation?
Since the time of Henry V, what multitudes of garden varieties
past the reckoning have been evolved from the smooth, conic
EUROPEAN WOOD STRAWBERRY (F. vesca) now naturalized in our
Eastern and Middle States, as well as from our own precious
pitted native! Some authorities claim the berry received its name
from the straw laid between garden rows to keep the fruit clean,
but in earliest Anglo-Saxon it was called streowberie, and later
straberry, from the peculiarity of its straying suckers lying as
if strewn on the ground; and so, after making due allowance for
the erratic, go-as-you-please spelling of early writers, it would
seem that there might be two theories as to the origin of the
name.
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