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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.
Record at a glance
Growing profile
- Sun
- Full Sun · Partial Sun
- USDA zone
- USDA 5–9
- Soil
- Sand · Loam · Clay
- Moisture
- Dry · Well-Drained · Moderate · Moist
Vertical layer
Groundcover- Soil pH
- 5.5–8
- Plant type
- Perennial
- Mature height
- 4–9 in
- Mature spread
- 12–24 in
- Plant spacing
- 12–15 in
- Root type
- Stolon
- Spread pattern
- Root
Keep exploring
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Beach Strawberry
Fragaria chiloensis
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Bilberry
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Black Medick
Medicago lupulina
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Brahmi
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The deeper layer
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- Primary
- Locked ecological function
- Secondary
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- Byproduct
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Behind the record
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