A Secret History of Strawberries
A Secret History of Strawberries
Preston Pouteaux
On the Goodness Beyond Our Imagination
This essay is featured in Ekstasis Issue 10 Print Edition
“Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did.” — William Butler
Do you know what strawberries are? I mean, real and enchanted strawberries? It seems we barely register a strawberry when we come across it. Today it is as ordinary as free Wi-Fi or coffee cream. Strawberries lean evenly to one side in their clamshell packaging, stacked high at the supermarket. Convenient and uniform, the labeled container held closed with a plastic snap. The only surprise is that they used to be $5.49, now they’re $5.99. Oh well. Inflation, we suppose. It was bound to happen. We slide a container into our shopping cart, a pint destined for tomorrow’s smoothie, or the kids’ lunch.
Strawberries have a secret history. The strawberries of legend are almost unrecognizable from what they have become. Strawberries were not always synthesized into flavorings for jellos and breakfast cereals. They were not always what they are. Strawberries were once beatific.
This would be a good time for you to open the plastic container of strawberries languishing at the back of your fridge. Take a bite. What do you actually taste? Anything at all?
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, “one must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.” Wonder, the kind only accessible to those with innocent awe, urges us to see and taste all over again. Perhaps we blame the strawberries for failing to dazzle. Maybe our taste buds are shot. Whatever it is, our imaginations have settled into this strange blandness, and so we expect nothing more than to lop off the green tops and toss them in the blender. We need others—perhaps it’s the children and the birds—to show us how to taste. Strawberries are an accessible and tender starting point to help us see what we might have forgotten to look for; what to enjoy. This singular fruit may show us how to expect again.
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Strawberries hold a peculiar place of wonder in history’s imagination and lore. Some Native American stories hold the strawberry in a high place of honor. One Cherokee legend tells of the first husband and wife who were at peace for a time, then fought and parted ways. They wandered alone and sad until the Creator saw their sorrow. So, the Creator set out berries along a trail to draw the couple back together. Blackberries, huckleberries, and other fruit did not lead them any closer to finding each other. The Creator made the first ever patch of ripe strawberries, and upon discovery, the couple’s hearts were softened, and they remembered love. The legend says, “at last she gathered a bunch of the finest berries and started back along the path to give them to him. He met her kindly and they went home together.” Strawberries were the fruit of forgiveness and love, they grew between two people and drew them together again. When shared, they mended what seemed beyond repair. Strawberries were a gift from the Creator’s hand.
History tells a story of people enchanted by this small red fruit. Strawberries grew on rustic hillsides and were not widely cultivated until the 17th century. Prior to this, gardeners made attempts at transplanting strawberries from the wild. The plants in their new surroundings would, according to Peter Blackburne-Maze in Fruit: An Illustrated History, “produce fruit the following year or the next one, after which they would be discarded.” Roger Williams, an early colonist to Rhode Island, observed that strawberries were “the wonder of all fruits growing naturally in these parts . . . I have many times seen as many as would fill a good ship, within few miles compass.” Rolling fields full of this seasonal fruit, though proven hard to tame, captured imaginations in the New World, and the old.
In ancient times Greek philosophers referenced the strawberries, but they were still rare in their region: though small and uncommon, the strawberry held a kind of allure. Centuries later, Saint Augustine reflects on how the strawberry was unique and unimaginable to him before tasting it. He writes in Letter 7, “As small children living inland we could imagine the seas from the sight of water in a cup, whereas the taste of strawberries or cherries, before we tried them in Italy, never occurred to us.” Strawberries so endeared the senses that it opened, for Augustine, a kind of world of possibility beyond what he could imagine. It was only in tasting one that he could even conceive of such goodness.
The rarity of this fruit in Europe made it all the more valuable. Markus Bockmuehl explains that “prior to the seventeenth century strawberries were not easily and widely cultivated; and this meant that, although they were popular to gather in the fields and eat with cream or wine and sugar, they always remained something of a luxury and only the rich could afford to buy them. As late as 1680, the accounts for a London wedding dinner for seven people suggest that a ‘dish of strabreys’ had cost six shillings, about six times a labourer’s daily wage” (Strawberries, the Food of Paradise: A Study in Christian Symbolism). Strawberries, due in large part to their value and charm, became known as a fruit from heaven.
In late medieval Europe and during the Renaissance, the near-mythical strawberry found its place in the imagination of artists and Christian philosophers. They wondered at the apparent symbolism this heavenly fruit might proffer. Strawberries were, to their eyes and mouths, a miracle. They had white flowers that symbolized purity and berries red like the blood of Christ and the wound of love. The seeds on the outside of a strawberry pointed to renewal, and the leaves were reflective of the Trinity.
They were also inspired by the resilient plant itself. This little bush grew in low places, in hard conditions, and still seemed to thrive without concern. For those willing to look, a perfectly ripe strawberry could be found peeking out unspoiled from under leafy debris and rot. The strawberry was life even in the midst of death. For all its beauty, the strawberry plant did not protect itself with thorns and offered its fruit for picking without difficulty. This berry seemed to be a perfect picture of the fruit of the spirit mentioned by Paul to the Galatians (Gal. 5:22–23). Here we have, growing in hard places and free for all, a gift from heaven. A fruit so full of symbols of hope, goodness, sacrifice, love, and delight that it seemed to be very much a pleasure from the hand of God.
The strawberry, then, provided a kind of sensory sermon that inspired people to consider their own faith and devotion to Christ. Soon, strawberries made their way into the borders and backgrounds of religious art. Artists would depict the stories of the Bible and of the saints and tuck strawberries into the scene. They were small but poignant reminders of the good and the beautiful—a coming together of heaven and earth. These berries would have been a nod to the kind of love, joy, peace, patience, and kindness that God’s spirit nurtures in the soil of a pained world.
Bockmuehl helps us understand the wonder woven throughout. He says, “Symbols are earth’s window to heaven, they are islands in the cosmos where human vision assumes a curious double focus, perceiving now a piece of creation, now a flash of the Creator’s deeper, vaster world beyond. For pre-Reformation Christianity the world was abrim with such pointers to God and to spiritual truth. For us moderns, by contrast, the heavens no longer seem to declare the glory of God.”
The strawberry, though now thoroughly tamed, rolls over in our imagination as a latent and timely invitation. Is it possible that this diminutive fruit is a “flash of the Creator’s deeper, vaster world beyond?” Is it still too late to see other flashes of the Creator’s world much closer than we would expect? While we may nearly have lost the ability to see the glory of God in places like strawberry patches, apiaries, around kitchen tables, and across the street or throughout our neighborhood, the garden awaits with its surprise. Strawberries, these symbols acting as “earth’s window to heaven,” might be kindly drawing us out into our proximal future. It may be that the very life we are looking for is found in our neighborhoods, in the ordinary places between us and others, and it may be that God is growing something for us to enjoy. Strawberries, in their ancient and enchanting way, reorient our imaginations to see all that is beautiful and growing nearby. When I gather strawberries I wonder, is something growing and fruiting by the hand of God in my community? Are the plastic and vinyl suburban homes that edge my neighborhood just the façade, or do I stop to see something more? Perhaps, like the first man and woman in the Cherokee story, the Creator is leaving a trail of strawberries hoping we will follow long enough to draw near and find each other once more.
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Fruit is not as mysterious as it once was. We’ve dispelled much of the mythology around the strawberry, and perhaps that is why it sits in plastic containers at the grocery store as one more commodity to be bought and blended up. But for all that it has stripped of wonder, it is science that is starting to bring us home, full circle. What research reveals about the unseen world of fruit is every bit as glorious as any myth or lore. There is more happening here than we see.
On long summer evenings I sit on the stone bench beside my beehive and breathe in the warm aroma of their sweet industry. Bees make my neighborhood beautiful. Their ongoing engagement with my place causes plants to thrive and fruit to grow. But it’s not a bee’s one visit to a plant that makes it fruit. Researchers have discovered that strawberry flowers need to be visited by pollinators many times for the best fruit to grow. Pollinators, it seems, are not just a utilitarian part of a system, rather their simple and tender visits to flowers over and over again is a kind of nurture that makes the fruit grow lush, sweet, and ripe.
Teja Tscharntke, an agroecologist at the University of Göttingen in Germany, carried out research which revealed that fruit grew better as more pollinators visited the flowers. Plants that were visited by few pollinators would grow smaller fruit that was often susceptible to deformities and malformation, was unable to withstand bruising, and was prone to more rapid decay. However, strawberry plants that were visited by many pollinators of different species would produce fruit several times per season, with greater yield, larger fruit size, less spoilage, and far fewer malformations. Pollinators trigger the plant to produce hormones that make the plant thrive (Erik Stokstad, “A Better Berry, Thanks to Bees”). Pollinators not only make fruit grow, but many pollinators tending regularly to fruiting plants make the fruit better and healthier. Science may reveal that sterile and untouched strawberry flowers will make tasteless and woody strawberries. We’re getting closer to the truth of it all.
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“Can you smell the strawberries?” our friend asked us as we walked up the hill, pointing out the native plants growing freely in every direction. Three of us were out looking for well-pollinated, wild strawberries. Birds flitted nearby, evidence of a berry patch that nourishes more than a few visiting
Preston Pouteaux
Author & Pastor
Preston is a neighborhood pastor, author, and beekeeper in Chestermere, Alberta
Painting by Virginia Granberry
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