While you may not easily be able to harvest enough of the berries at any one time to adequately go with your shortcake, our native strawberries are nevertheless worthy members of the garden if you’re looking for an easy-care, vigorous ground cover for most any setting.
Virtually care-free and energetic growers, strawberries spread by far-reaching runners carrying new offsets that can be left in place or easily transplanted to other spots in the garden. Left alone, it will form a lush, textured surface to the ground. But give it room to move, because it will spread its territory, moving around or over other plants in its path. In the right setting, this makes it the perfect carpeting ground cover or companion plant for other sturdy specimens.
Because of this underlying webwork of runners, Fragaria is useful as a soil-binding ground cover in coastal gardens as well as inland, especially the coastal F. chiloensis, which is evergreen. Since the others are not typically evergreen, they stop short of being as good for year-round serious erosion control, but work well in less-extreme situations as well as in tandem with other, more effective ground stabilizing plants.
There are three native species of Fragaria with a couple of additional, adaptive varieties, depending on environmental conditions where they are found.
All are low growing (2-8” in height) with the recognizable leaf structure: 5-petal white flowers in spring and small red berries in the early summer.
All require good drainage and will spread happily by runners. They are different enough from each other however, to be able to provide the ground cover solution in a variety of garden settings:
As the common name implies, this strawberry is found along the northwest coast, thriving on sand dunes and beaches and in sandy, gritty soil. The leaves are bright green and leathery, the berries tasty, and can thrive in full sun to partial shade, the leaves taking on a reddish tinge in the winter. It is one of the parent species of the cultivated strawberries.
There are two varieties of F. vesca, a taller one found in open woodlands (var. bracteata), and the smaller (var. crinita) found in more open, rocky places west of the Cascades. In both cases the leaves are softer, in both texture and color, than the coastal strawberry.
The species Fragaria virginiana is distinct from the other two species by the somewhat elongated gray-green leaves, finer textured like the woodland strawberry, lower growing like the coastal. It is found in drier meadows and open woodlands east of the Cascades, and so can take somewhat harsher conditions than its west-of-the-mountains cousins.
We offer a great selection of Northwest Natives from spring through fall. The plants featured are highlighted favorites, but they do not represent ALL of the plants we carry. For a more complete list, see our Northwest Native Plant List.
