This Sweet Native Plant Bears a Familiar Fruit

Name: Wild strawberry 

Location:  Grows in prairies, meadows, woodlands and savannas.  

Department: Native plants 

A wild strawberry plant. (Photo via Shutterstock)

About Me: Hello! Down here! Hi, I’m wild strawberry. My friends also call me Virginia strawberry and common strawberry. What’s wild is that some humans think I’m common just because I grow across many parts of the United States. Aside from that, you can find me all over the state of Illinois if there are black soil prairies, hill prairies, bluegrass meadows, woodlands or savannas nearby.  

Scientists call me Fragaria virginiana. The genus (first name) partially comes from Latin fraga, referring to the fragrance of my fruit. That also means there are other species of good-smelling strawberries out there. That’s not a brag; we strawberries belong to the Rosacaeae (rose) family, which means it’s in our DNA to smell good.  

Many Indigenous cultures also call me a heart berry, which references their creation stories. But you’ll have to ask them the full story. I can’t remember that far back!  

Identification: In case my 5-inch height isn’t tall enough for you humans to see, let me describe the finer details of my foliage. I have individual flowers that are about a half-inch to three-quarters of an inch across when they are fully open. Each flower has five white petals, five green sepals and five green sepal-like bracts. The petals are oval or circular in shape.  They are longer than either the sepals or sepal-like bracts.

What are sepals and bracts? They are the green cup-looking hairy leaves directly underneath the flower. They act as a layer of protection for my seeds before I bloom.  

I bloom from late spring to early summer, lasting about three to four weeks. Afterwards, the white flowers are replaced by fruits. But I will only grow my fruits if I think growing conditions — the amount of sun and quality of soil — are just right. These fruits are up to a half-inch long and across and look like fat, rounded heart shapes.   

My rounded heart fruits are edible. This means I am almost never lonely. Mammals such as black bears and opossums and reptiles like box turtles come to steal some lunch. But even before that, the nectar and pollen of the flowers attract little carpenter bees, cuckoo bees, andrenid bees, syrphid flies, butterflies and skippers.  

Small red strawberries having from a wild strawberry plant. (Photo via Shutterstock)

After all the berries are gone, I go dormant. Producing those berries is hard work! 

Fun fact: I am one of the parent plants to the strawberries you see in the grocery store! This means I shared some of my pollen with the coastal strawberry (Fragaria chiloensis) found along the Pacific coast in both North and South America. Fragara ananassa, the cultivated strawberry, inherited my superior flavor and the larger fruit size of the coastal strawberry.  

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