Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462, page 39 by Various Authors
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rimson colour, grows faster and faster, and becomes sweet and fragrant. Those which we commonly call the seeds of the strawberry, then lie on the surface, and these, if carefully examined, will prove to be the carpels containing the seeds in a little thin shell like a small nut. The strawberry is, therefore, not, properly speaking, a fruit; it is a fleshy receptacle, bearing the fruit on it, which fruit is, in fact, the ripe carpels. Now this structure is, as I have said, common to all strawberries, each variety having, however, its own peculiarities of growth and appearance.
There are but nine distinct species of the tribe Fragaria: one native in Germany, where it is called Erdbeere; two in North, and one in South America; one in Surinam; and one in India; the remaining three being indigenous in Britain, where, besides these three wild species, there are at least sixty mongrel varieties, the results of cultivation; some of which, recently produced from seed, are of great excellence. The finest of these native British species is the wood-strawberry (Fragaria vesca), which is common everywhere; the second, the hautboy (F. elatior), is much less frequently found, and is by Hooker supposed to be scarcely indigenous; and the third, the one-leaved strawberry (F. monophylla), is unknown to me, and only named by some writers as a species. The common wood-strawberry bears leaves smaller, more sharply notched, and more wrinkled in appearance, than any of the cultivated species. The earliest formed are closely covered, as is the stem, with white silvery hairs, and the leaves turn red early in the autumn, or in dry weather. The blossoms appear very early in the spring, throwing up their delicate white petals on every bank and hedgerow, among the clusters of violets and primroses, and even not unfrequently before these sweet harbingers of spring venture to unfold and give promise of abundant fruit. But though the blossoms are so common, from some reason or other the fruit seldom ripens free