More than 60 million passengers land or take off at London’s major airport Heathrow every year. But hardly any of the travelers will waste a thought that the birthplace of the modern strawberry lies nearby. The sweet, uniquely aromatic fruit that – as many a smart-talker at cocktail parties likes to mention without being asked – is not a berry at all, but a “cumulative nut fruit” and belongs to the rose family, apples, pears and plums.
Up until the beginning of the 19th century, one could hardly have made an impression with such know-it-all knowledge. The Fragaria species that were sold in markets at the time were simply too expensive: 175 dollars, today that would be 4550 dollars, paid such as a lady in Brooklyn in 1887 for a basket of strawberries to impress her guests at a party.
It is true that European strawberries, such as the wild strawberry Fragaria vesca, the musk strawberry F. moschata and the green strawberry F. viridis, cultivated and bred by the Romans and Greeks. But they stayed rather small, making harvesting difficult. For the strawberries that are mass-produced today, a global history of breeding was needed. And even a French spy.
The day rearview mirror
This column, usually on anniversaries in the fields of science, technology, nature and medicine, appears every weekday in the Science section, also in the printed newspaper.
New World white strawberry
The first dose of fresh strawberry genes came to Europe from the New World at the beginning of the 16th century: the North American one Fragaria virginiana. Another hundred years later, Amédée-François Frézier brought a strawberry species from Chile to Europe that had long been known for its particularly large, but white fruits. The French engineer had collected some of the seedlings while observing and mapping Spanish fortifications in his part-time spy job. Five copies survived the six-month return journey to France in 1714 F. chiloensis.
However, the plants initially bore hardly any fruit, Frézier had only brought females with him. Only his compatriot Antoine Nicolas Duchesne managed to give the Chilean variety a boost by feeding it with pollen from F. moschata pollinated. In 1764 he was able to serve the French King Louis XIV strawberries, which were quite similar to today’s.
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The first variants with large red fruits then appeared in England: crossings of the North American ones F. virginiana and the Chilean F. chiloensis, which were sometimes more, sometimes less systematically bred. The varieties most commonly used today probably go back to a gardener who worked in Isleworth – between what is now Heathrow Airport and Kew Gardens, London’s Royal Botanic Gardens. On July 3rd, 1806, 217 years ago today, this Michael Keens of the Royal Horticultural Society introduced that strawberry variety that “Keens Seedling variety“, to which all of the approximately 600 variants used today can be traced back.
Read all the episodes of the “Tagesrückspiegel” column that have been published so far here.
2023-07-03 10:03:34
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