Wild Strawberry - Fragaria virginiana - Fraise sauvage

I had more or less resigned myself to not getting to enjoy some delicious, delicious wild strawberries this year, though they are the best strawberries. That's because I am stuck in the city for most of the summer and certainly for the last two weeks of June which tend to be the season for them.

Fragaria virginiana in bloom at the lake mid-May

There have been a few strawberry plants here and there, and I was at the lake over the Victoria Day weekend and able to snap a few photos of the flowers (which I talk about in a previous post about the evolution of separate sexes in plants).

Fragaria virginiana - flower that I photographed at the lake this spring

Though I had even spotted a few Fragaria virginiana here in Montreal, most of them were in regularly-mown lawns so my hope of getting any berries were slim to none. I spotted this plant and its fruit at one point mid-June, but when I returned a few days later the fruit had disappeared:

Fragaria virginiana fruit - almost but not quite ripe

So, as I noted above, I had pretty much given up on the hope of eating any of the tastiest strawberries in existence (hands down, no contest, I will hear no disagreement on this point). Imagine my surprise then, when, during a stroll this afternoon (free from work for the St-Jean Baptiste), I happened across a patch of strawberries fresh and ripe and unmown!

Naturally, I set to work immediately on picking them. A few minutes' work netted me this rather nice little haul here:

Fragaria virginiana - a lucky find

And I devoured them with great gusto. As far as I can determine, there are only two possible reasons I was lucky enough to beat somebody else to these: 1) nobody else noticed them, or 2) nobody else was shameless enough to eat strawberries picked in a cemetery. Yep. These were in the Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery (no, not around any graves, I wasn't crawling about between tombstones in front of mourners). At any rate they were delicious. I believe that their deliciousness is entirely worth the effort, small though they are.

I regret nothing.