Wild Strawberries
20 May 2023
By: James Lennox
Uninvited guests. They can either be the life and soul of the party regaling everyone with new tales, flitting gracefully from one group to the next. Or they can be obnoxious gatecrashers merely looking for a free drink.
It took me about a dozen years to make up my mind on wild strawberries (Fragraria vesca). At first, merely because they arrived uninvited, I couldn’t help but be suspicious of their intentions. How dare they wheedle their way in? What did they want? What trouble might they cause?
They arrived in the woodland garden one spring. Or at least that’s when I first noticed them. The woodland is one of those areas where I can easily turn a blind eye to what’s happening at ground level and just gaze up at the trees, trying to remember which ones I grew from seed, which I popped in as transplants from elsewhere and which I bought as whips and nurtured through their early years.
This particular spring, instead of picturing the future, I actually got down on my hands and knees to deal with some brambles. And that’s when I noticed that the ground was newly covered in foliage. Neat, glossy, textured, toothed edges, dark green and healthy. And hanging six inches above, dancing in the slightest breeze, were delicate white flowers just waiting for the bees to do their thing and turn them into tiny red berries.
And that’s when I decided to embark on a little experiment to see how well-behaved these new arrivals might be. I left them to their own devices for a couple of years.
One of the greatest challenges of gardening in a different climate, region or even country from the one you grew up in is that plants don’t always behave in the way you’ve come to expect. And they certainly haven’t read the same books as you. Wild strawberries might well be native to Britain (although now classed as “near threatened” because of loss of their natural habitat) as well as Spain but, as I’ve discovered, the same plant can behave very differently in each country.
So caution is key. I keep having to remind myself that northern Spain is a part of the world where the introduced pampas grass (Cortaderia selloana) planted in the centre of British suburban lawns back in the 1970s is an invasive menace that resists the combined forces of highway maintenance crews, flame-throwers and industrial-strength herbicide.
All I wanted was to see whether wild strawberries would clothe otherwise bare ground, not encroach on deliberate plantings and take care of themselves. Oh, and look respectable all year round, produce fruit and crowd out the undesirables.
The results are now in. They perform admirably in full sun or deep shade. They need no attention, reward the crouching gardener with fruit (mice and birds seem to overlook them) and keep the ground cool and moist in summer. They trap leaves in autumn as they fall from the trees above, instead of allowing such a precious resource to be blown towards an ungrateful neighbour. And if they do make a run for it and start mingling a bit too forcefully, they are the easiest thing in the world to tame.
Of course there are more choice plants. And of course you’ll spot them fending for themselves in the countryside roundabout, or even in other gardens. But they have their charms and their uses in the more relaxed parts of one’s own garden. Anything that means I have to spend less time on my hands and knees deserves a place here.
They’re definitely not so much problematic gatecrashers as surprisingly good company. The only puzzle is why it took me so long to realise what an asset they can be.
