This Week's Mystery Plant

Whatever humor this little plant might have must be truly tasteless. Well, its fruits are tasteless, anyway.

The fruits are gorgeous, brilliant red, and are dead ringers for the cultivated strawberry. Bite into it, though, and you'll get a watery flavor, and not much else. Sort of like damp cardboard.

The true strawberries belong to a plant genus called Fragaria, and there are several species in Europe and North America. In fact, we have a couple of native wild strawberries in the eastern United States. All of the true strawberries are characterized by flowers with five sepals and five petals, many slender stamens, and a large number of tiny, separate pistils. They are set apart by white petals, and a fruit which is juicy and very sweet. Our Mystery Plant, although not a true strawberry, has very similar flowers, but the petals are bright yellow, and its fruit is somewhat dry and mealy, and has practically no taste at all.

This curious plant, being closely related to the true strawberries, shares an important fruit characteristic with them. They all produce what botanists call an aggregate fruit. In this case, the interior of the flower (the receptacle) swells dramatically after pollination. Each pistil on the surface of the receptacle develops a single tiny, dark, enclosed seed, or achene. Many dozens of these tiny achenes will dot the exterior of a mature strawberry. Technically then, a single flower produces several dozen tiny, dry fruits, all studding the exterior of the swollen receptacle.

This species is common through all of the eastern United States, and it occurs on the Pacific Coast as well, but mostly skips the interior, between Texas and Arizona. It is not a native species, but comes from Asia, and is known from Japan through India and the Himalayas. In fact, it has become a fairly common introduction in many parts of the globe, including Europe, Africa, and the New World. Now naturalized, it is commonly seen in gardens as something of a weed. It seems to prefer moist soil, and it can endure considerable shade. Many people tolerate it in their gardens as a benign little pest, as the flowers and fruits are attractive, and birds probably eat the fruits. (Wonder if it tastes like damp cardboard to them?) (Photo by John Nelson.)

Photo by John Nelson