Plant · P-460

Virginia Strawberry

Fragaria virginiana

Virginia strawberry is the wild parent of the cultivated garden strawberry, native across eastern and central North America from Newfoundland west to Manitoba and south to Georgia and Oklahoma. It bears small, sweet, succulent fruit eaten raw, cooked, or preserved, and its dried leaves make a pleasant, vitamin-C-rich tea. It spreads indefinitely by above-ground stolons that root at every node into a continuous mat, so it works equally well as a fruit crop or as a shade-tolerant groundcover - though fruit set falls off as shade deepens. Hot summers compress its harvest to a short early-spring window rather than stopping it outright, and the mat itself keeps working as groundcover once the fruit is finished.