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#REDIRECT [[Strawberry]]
#REDIRECT [[Strawberry]]
Fragaria (Latin, fragrance, from the smell of the fruit). Rosaceae. Strawberry. Low perennial creeping herbs grown for the excellent fruit, and one or two species for ornament.
Plant stemless, with scaly rootstock or crown, and rooting runners: lvs. palmately 3-foliolate and toothed, all from the crown: fls. white or reddish, in corymbose racemes on slender, leafless scapes, sometimes lacking stamens; calyx deeply 5-lobcd and reinforced by 5 sepal-like bracts; petals 5, obovate, elliptic or orbicular; stamens many, short; pistils many, on a conical receptacle, becoming small and hard achenes and persisting on the enlarging receptacle, which becomes pulpy and edible.—The fragarias are exceedingly variable. About 150 specific names have been applied to them, but Bentham and Hooker would reduce them all to 3 or 4 species, and Focke (in Engler & Prantl) to about 8. Rydberg, however, accepts 27 N. American species (N. Amer. Flora, XXII, part 4. 1908). Of the true fragarias, about 4 species-types are interesting to the horticulturist as the parents of the garden strawberries:—F. chiloensis, the probable original of the ordinary cultivated strawberries of Amer.; F. virginiana, which was early domesticated, and of which some trace still remains in cult, varieties; F. moschata, the Hautbois, and F. vesca, the alpine and perpetual strawberries, which are little cult, in this country. The classical work on strawberries is Duchesne's "Histoire Naturelle des Fraisiers," 1766. See Strawberry. For Fragaria indica, see Duchesnea.
