Photo: Dr U — Public domain · source
Survives zone 4 through 8
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
A fertile hybrid combining a chromosome-doubled woodland strawberry with the garden strawberry, bred to merge the size and vigor of the garden strawberry with the intense aroma of the woodland strawberry; breeding began in 1918, with named cultivars following from the late 1970s onward.
- Hardiness
- Zone 4–8
- Habit
- Groundcover
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- Summer–autumn
- Mature size
- Rosette 20–30 cm, larger than either parent, spreading by runners
- Light
- Full sun to partial
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.0 (near-neutral)
- Environment
- Garden origin
- Native range
- No wild range — a bred cross of the alpine strawberry F. vesca with the cultivated F. × ananassa, made to put wild-strawberry aroma into a larger fruit.
- Status
- Cultivated
- Years to fruit
- 2–4 yrs
- Growth speed
- Vigorous, comparable to the garden-strawberry parent, with especially strong runner production in the first year or two after planting.
- Spacing
- 35 cm (14 in) apart — about 8.2 per m² (7.6 per 10 sq ft)
- Leaf shape
- Trifoliate and intermediate between its parents — larger and thicker than F. vesca, smaller than a garden strawberry.
- 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
- Fruit is smaller than the garden strawberry but carries excellent flavor inherited from the woodland-strawberry parent; medium to medium-large, attractive red berries with rose-colored flesh, a fine aromatic flavor and a balanced sugar-to-acid ratio.
- Propagation
- Propagated asexually via runners, exactly like other cultivated strawberries; seed propagation isn't used for named cultivars since these are complex bred hybrid genotypes.
- 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. Documented as producing unusually strong runner growth in its first year or two, forming a dense stand of densely and randomly distributed plants — though at least one cultivar was bred to produce comparatively few runners instead.
Growing tips. At least one cultivar is documented as needing minimal spray input, with low susceptibility to gray mold and good resistance to mildew and blight, making it suited to low-input home-garden plantings rather than intensive row cultivation.
Grow journal
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