On Strawberries

Abstract

The modern strawberry is a made thing, an artifact that traces its genealogy to a plantsman's experiments in northern France in the early 1700s. Striving to domesticate the strawberry for the garden and finding the wild woodland strawberry of Europe uncooperative, attention shifted to the berries of the Americas. This chapter looks at the rise of strawberry culture on the Eastern Shore of Virginia with particular attention to the terroir of field labor, storytelling, marketing, and cuisine revealed through historical narratives, recipes, and oral histories.