National Strawberry Day gives a whole day to the berry that usually turns up as somebody else's ingredient. Eat a box of them plain, before anyone can put them on top of something.
No founder, proclamation or establishing record for a February 27 National Strawberry Day was located in the indexes searched. The earliest record found is a holiday listing archived on 2 December 2013, headed simply Strawberry Day, which credits no one and cites nothing.
A California newspaper reported in June 1885 that the fruit dealers of Arkansas observed Thursday week as Strawberry Day. The archive cuts the sentence off before it says who received the fruit they gave away. National Strawberry Day, the version that now falls on February 27, appears nowhere in that archive at all.
Search those California papers from 1850 to 1990 and the plain phrase turns up 193 times. The modern name returns zero. The word is old, in other words, and the observance is not.
Neither is the fruit, which is the stranger half of the story. The plant behind a supermarket punnet is a newcomer. Getting it there took a Chilean garden, a French army engineer and a teenage botanist at Versailles.
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National Strawberry Day ran on February 27. Here’s who celebrated with offers this year.
The strawberry that mattered grew in Chile, long before any of this had a calendar date. The Picunche, north of the Biobio River, and the Mapuche to its south cultivated strawberries more than 1,000 years ago. Both white and red fruited forms were domesticated, and the white may have been preferred for its size.
Nothing about the modern berry was inevitable. Two plants that grew a hemisphere apart had to reach the same country first.
Amedee Francois Frezier was an engineer in the French Army Intelligence Corps, sent by Louis XIV to make a reconnaissance of Chile and Peru. The king was apparently determined to keep his grandson on the Spanish throne. Frezier was no botanist, but in George Darrow's phrase he had the botanist's impulse for collecting.
He came home with plants. As the story goes, he nursed them on limited water across a six-month voyage and landed five at Marseille. Two went to the ship's owner, one to the Royal Garden, one to the minister of fortifications, and he kept the last.
Antoine Nicolas Duchesne reached strawberries in 1761, at Versailles, where his father was superintendent of the king's buildings. He picked a single-leafleted plant out of a bed of ordinary three-leafleted ones and sent it to Linnaeus, who published it as Fragaria monophylla.
Only female Chilean plants had reached Europe, so they fruited badly. In 1764 Duchesne pollinated them with pollen from another species, and the berries won him an audience with Louis XV.
He was 19 when Histoire naturelle des fraisiers appeared in 1766. It carried a drawn genealogy of the genus, since regarded as the second published phylogenetic network, and its central hypothesis was later proved right.
American towns were doing this a century ago, in the fruit's own season. Gardena, California, billed a Strawberry Day for Saturday 6 May 1916, with a seventy-five-mile automobile race as the draw. Riverside was invited by advertisement.
Nothing that careful attaches to February 27. The earliest record located for the modern observance is a holiday listing archived in December 2013, headed simply Strawberry Day. It named no founder and cited nothing, and the National prefix appears a year later.
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Join us and the nation today in celebrating the beloved heart-shaped, juicy strawberry.
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
The world's best-known berry still has a disputed family tree.
A 2019 Nature Genetics paper reported that four diploid progenitor species merged into a single nucleus more than a million years ago, and named a living relative for each one. A reanalysis published in the same journal that December found support for only two, and none for the hexaploid species proposed as a direct ancestor.
Around 30 to 40 hectares of the Chilean strawberry are still cultivated in open fields in Chile, yielding roughly 3 to 4 tons a hectare. A small community of growers there and in Ecuador raises those land races for commercial sale in local markets.
Botanists describe the cultivated strawberry as one of the youngest domesticated plants, with no existence at all before the 18th century. Its two parents came from North and South America, and neither of them is the fruit sold in a punnet today.
MYTH VS FACT
The little specks on the outside are the strawberry's seeds.
They are achenes, and they are the plant's true fruits, closer to a sunflower seed and its shell than to a bare seed. The red part everyone eats is the receptacle, the tissue the fruits are set into.
A strawberry is a berry.
Botanically it is an aggregate accessory fruit, built from dry achenes embedded in a fleshy receptacle. Researchers at the Cal Poly Strawberry Center call it a pseudocarp.
French botanists deliberately bred the modern strawberry.
It came from an accidental cross of the white-fruited Chilean strawberry and the North American meadow strawberry in a royal botanical garden in France. The botany came afterwards, explaining a plant that had already appeared.
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No. No legal or federal recognition was located, and the Federal Register index returns nothing for the phrase, so February 27 is a normal working day.
COLOPHON
Celebrate National Pick Strawberries Day with a fresh, juicy, and sweet treat! Enjoy picking your own strawberries outdoors or find them at a local market.
Fabulous Florida Strawberry Month celebrates the berries Florida picks while the rest of the country is still in winter. Buy them by the flat, eat them fresh, and save a few for shortcake.
National Strawberry Ice Cream Day puts a summer flavor on a winter calendar, which is most of its charm. Pick up a pint on the way home, or churn your own and let it soften a minute before you serve it.
