Strawberry Day

What the day is

Strawberry Day is observed on February 27. Almost nothing about the strawberry is what it appears to be.

Origin and background

Botanically it is not a berry. The red flesh is not fruit tissue at all but the swollen receptacle, the part of the flower stem that held the other parts. The actual fruits are the small hard specks on the outside, each one a dry single-seeded fruit called an achene. A strawberry therefore carries its fruit on the surface of something that is technically stem.

Those specks are also in charge. They release hormones that drive the receptacle to swell, and the classic demonstration is to strip them from part of a developing strawberry, whereupon that section fails to grow while the rest fills out. The flesh exists only because the achenes instruct it to.

The garden strawberry has an origin that sounds invented. Neither parent is European. A French military engineer, Amédée-François Frézier, was sent to South America in the early eighteenth century, partly to survey Spanish fortifications, and brought back plants of a large-fruited Chilean species. In French gardens those plants happened to grow alongside a North American species already in cultivation, the two crossed, and the hybrid produced fruit larger and better than either parent. Every modern garden strawberry descends from that accidental cross between two American species, made in Europe. Frézier's surname, as French speakers invariably note, resembles the word for strawberry.

The plants spread by runners, so a strawberry bed is largely clonal, and the fruit does not ripen further after picking, which is why a pale supermarket strawberry never improves in the bowl.

How to take part

• Look closely at the achenes and note that you are eating the stem.
• Buy only fully red fruit, since strawberries do not ripen after picking.
• Hull them after washing, not before, or they fill with water.
• Propagate from runners, which is free and easy.
• Look up Frézier, whose day job was spying on fortifications.