By the 1600s, two 'new' strawberries were introduced to Europe from the Americas—the Virginia strawberry (Fragaria virginiana), native to eastern North America, and the coastal or beach strawberry (Fragaria chiloensis), native to the west coast of North and South America. Cultivated together, the American species hybridized producing the first of the modern garden strawberries (Fragaria X ananassa (Weston) Duchesne).
Some odd things happened along the way to becoming the modern strawberry. American strawberries were usually dioecious bearing staminate (male) or pistillate (female) flowers on separate plants. Once hybridized, the flowers were self-fertile having both stamens and pistils and, hence, all plants produced fruit.
Strawberries tended to be short-day plants—they bloomed and produced fruit when the length of daylight was shorter than a certain number of hours (depends upon latitude). This gave a good crop in the spring and a few berries in the autumn. This may well have been the reason why people simply did not cultivate strawberries until the Renaissance. It would have been too much work for perishable fruit once a year.
Modern strawberry varieties still have short-day plants usually called 'June bearers'. But in all the crossing and back crossing some plants switched. These strawberries became long-day plants or 'ever-bearing' and produce flowers whenever there are at least a certain number of hours of daylight. Other 'ever-bearers' are day-neutral and will produce whenever growing conditions (warmth and rainfall) are right.
When a strawberry plant has plenty of water, it glistens in the early morning. This is not dew. Through a process called guttation, the droplets of water are exuded from pores called hydathodes at the tips of the leaf veins. Guttation allows the plant to rid itself of excess water.
(Compiled from: "Fragaria" and "Strawberry", Hortus Third, Staff L.H. Bailey Hortorium, NY State College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University, Macmillan, NY, 1976; "Strawberry", Southern Living Garden Book, S. Bender, ed., Oxmoor House, Birmingham, AL, 1998; "Fragaria", A-Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants, C. Brickell and J.D. Zuk, eds., American Horticultural Society, DK Publishing, NY, 1996; Biology of Plants, 5th Ed.,P.H. Raven, R.F. Evert, and S.E. Eichhorn, Worth Publishers, NY, 1992; "Growing Strawberries for the Home Garden", Nancy Garrison, Master Gardeners of Santa Clara County Online, University of California Cooperative Extension, San Jose, 2003.)
