Chili Strawberry

The Chili strawberry was never successfully established at Monticello. Jefferson tried; he sent nursery-grown plants to Charlottesville from Philadelphia in 1798, but his ensuing persistent yet fruitless requests of Bartram and McMahon for this "immensely valuable" species suggests the plants never arrived or else died soon after planting. Amedée Frézier came across this species with the largest berries of any Fragaria while monitoring Spanish activities in South America. Frézier was so impressed by the large berries of this species, "the size of hen's eggs," that on the long journey home he sacrificed his personal supply of drinking water to keep them alive. The five plants that survived the trans-oceanic journey were distributed to botanical gardens in France; however, they were all pistillate and so the species received a reputation for being unproductive. This imperfect propensity, however, was significant in providing the ideal match for staminate Virginia strawberries, and when the two species were grown side by side in a Dutch botanical garden in the 1760s, the resultant marriage produced the famous Pine.

Fragaria chiloensis is one of the few species indigenous to both North and South America, growing along the Pacific coast from Alaska to Patagonia. Admired for its enormous fruit rather than a flavor William Cobbett said was "little superior to the potato," the Chili differs dramatically from the Virginia strawberry: the very large, firm fruit is brownish-red with a whitish (rather than pale scarlet) flesh, the leaves are thick, leathery, and shiny, obviously adapted to xerophytic beach conditions. Although McMahon said, "I have none nor have I seen any in America," the Chili was a standard offering in commercial nurseries from 1771.

Peter J. Hatch, Director
Gardens and Grounds
January 1997

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