Photo: Stickpen — Public domain · source
Survives zone 7 through 9
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
Known as the peach strawberry — this Himalayan-to-south-central-China species produces small white-to-pale-pink fruit with a distinctive peach-like fragrance rather than typical strawberry flavor, making it valuable breeding material for flavor improvement in cultivated strawberries.
- Hardiness
- Zone 7–9
- Habit
- Groundcover
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- Summer–autumn
- Mature size
- Low rosette 10–20 cm, spreading by runners
- Light
- Partial shade
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.0 (near-neutral)
- Environment
- Montane
- Native range
- Southwestern India and Nepal through central and southern China and Taiwan, into northern Indochina, at elevations of 700–3,000 m.
- Status
- Wild
- Years to fruit
- 2–4 yrs
- Growth speed
- Slow to establish from seed, but grows vigorously and spreads quickly once established.
- Spacing
- 30 cm (12 in) apart — about 11 per m² (10 per 10 sq ft)
- Leaf shape
- Thick, obovate to elliptic leaflets 1–4.5 cm, dark green above, densely silky yellow-brown-haired beneath.
- Root system
- Shallow and fibrous from a short woody crown, almost all of it in the top 15–30 cm, with new roots striking down wherever a runner touches soil. Nothing to dig around: the crown must sit at soil level, buried too deep it rots and planted too high it dries out.
- Fruit description
- Small (roughly 1–2 cm) globose berries ripening white tinged with yellow or pale pink-red; texture and eating quality rate below the garden strawberry, but the fruit carries a notable peach-like aroma and flavor.
- Propagation
- By seed, sown in spring (four or more weeks to germinate), or by dividing rooted runners, best done in July–August; runners can be planted directly into a permanent position.
- Pollination
- Self-fertile
The edible parts listed above are a starting point, not a field guide. Identify a plant with certainty — ideally against a local authority — before eating any part of it, and read the full disclaimer. Spotted something wrong? Report it.
Growing guide
How it spreads. Vigorous and spreading — slow to establish from seed but spreads rapidly by runners once growing.
Growing tips. Valued by strawberry breeders for its unusual peach-like fruit aroma and has been used in interspecific hybridization to breed more aromatic garden-strawberry cultivars; naturally grows in valley-forest clearings and thickets, so appreciates cool, humus-rich, part-shaded conditions.
Grow journal
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