A tiny relative of the garden fruit with three-lobed glossy leaves, white flowers from April and 1 cm red berries from June
Wild strawberry — Fragaria vesca.
Nature · Wildflowers & flowers
Wild strawberry
Native · flowers Apr–Jul, fruits from June · hedge banks, woodland edges and chalk grassland
Fragaria vesca — Rosaceae
The wild strawberry, or wood strawberry, is a small creeping perennial of hedge banks, woodland edges and chalk downland, with three-lobed leaves, white flowers from April and tiny, intensely flavoured red fruits in summer. It is not the ancestor of the garden strawberry, and is now classed as near threatened in England.
How to spot them
- ▸Three-lobed, glossy, toothed, hairy leaves (trifoliate), plant up to 30 cm tall, spreading by runners
- ▸Small white flowers with five rounded petals and a yellow centre, April to July
- ▸Bright red berries about 1 cm, seeds on the surface, from June
- ▸Look-alike: barren strawberry (Potentilla sterilis) has dull leaves, petals with gaps between them and a notch at each tip, and only tiny, inedible green fruits
- ▸Look-alike: wild raspberry has compound leaves of five to seven serrated leaflets
How to know it
A hedge-bank plant with round, non-notched white petals and glossy leaves; the dull-leaved, notch-petalled look-alike bears no edible fruit
Wild strawberry versus barren strawberry.
William Morris celebrated it in his Strawberry Thief textile pattern
Wild strawberry.
The larval food plant of the declining grizzled skipper butterfly and the strawberry tortrix moth
Wild strawberry.
In Norse myth it is associated with Freyja, and in Roman myth with Venus
Wild strawberry.
Classed as near threatened in England because 97 per cent of unimproved wildflower meadows have gone since the 1930s
Wild strawberry — per the Woodland Trust.
Quick-fire facts
- •Family Rosaceae, the rose family; also called wood strawberry and alpine strawberry
- •Woodland Trust: flowers April to July, fruits from June, up to 30 cm tall
- •Classed as near threatened in England
- •Grows across the UK, rarer in the north of Scotland, favouring lime-rich soils
- •Fruits eaten by slugs, mice and birds; flowers visited by bumblebees, solitary bees and hoverflies
- •Larval food plant of the grizzled skipper and the strawberry tortrix moth
- •William Morris's Strawberry Thief pattern celebrates it
- •Historically girls in Cornwall rubbed the leaves on their faces to improve their complexion
Drill it — 6 cards
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Sources
- Woodland Trust — Wild strawberry (Fragaria vesca)