Strawberries seem simple at first glance, but their history is really a story of two worlds meeting. Before the modern garden strawberry became common, people in Europe, Asia, and the Americas knew different wild and cultivated species with their own flavors, sizes, and growing habits. The contrast between Old World strawberries and New World species helps explain how a small woodland fruit eventually became one of the most popular berries in the world. Their differences involve geography, botany, taste, and agriculture, but the most important point is that modern strawberries exist because these separate traditions finally crossed.
Old World strawberries generally refer to species native to Europe and parts of Asia. Among the best known are Fragaria vesca, often called the woodland or alpine strawberry, Fragaria moschata, the musk strawberry, and Fragaria viridis. These plants were familiar in medieval and early modern Europe, where they were gathered from forests or grown in gardens on a small scale. They
