In the earliest days of the French in St. Tammany Parish a ship’s carpenter named Andre Penicaut stayed with the Colapissa on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain at Bayou Castine. He wrote a memoire describing how hospitable the Indians were by providing a bounty of food, lodging and wild celebration. He also mentioned how the lovely Indian maidens gathered platters of wild strawberries from the woods and offered them to the weary French travelers. His wonderful word pictures were of a romantic, idyllic Louisiana paradise.
Well now, are these the same tiny red strawberries we find popping up on the lawns at Camp Salmen and elsewhere every spring? They sure look like miniature strawberries. They grow close to the ground like strawberries do and they have similar leaves. One day my curiosity got the better of me and I decided to taste one. BLEH. No way could I imagine feasting on a mess of these. This berry had no taste and a dry, pithy texture. Fortunately it was not poisonous and eating it did not result in an agonizing, instantaneous death. Neither was it the sweet, succulent fruit I had ginned up in my overactive imagination. Was Penicaut drunk on all that Indian hospitality? What is the story here?
There is a wild strawberry in the North American woods called Fragaria virginiana and these are known to be quite tasty. They were no doubt collected and eaten by the natives (who were, after all, hunter/gatherers) but you would probably need the help of someone like Euell Gibbons to find them. This fruit was eventually hybridized with other varieties of strawberries from Europe and elsewhere to become the delectable modern strawberry.
So what about the tasteless red runts growing on the ground here? Ah-ha! They are Duchesnea indica, also known as False or Mock Strawberries. They’ve also been given the name Indian Strawberry, not because the Native Americans had anything to do with them but because they came from Asia; they’re another invasive species from China. In fact, the Chinese call them Snake Strawberries, probably because they grow so close to the ground. The Chinese have also figured out a number of ways to use them as herbal medicine. The USDA classifies them as a noxious, invasive weed naturalized to North America and despised by lawn connoisseurs because of their profligate growth. Modern genetic analysis shows both berries are actually related to roses and extra chromosomes make strawberries and roses exceptionally pliable to hybridization.
If you could manage to collect enough of these false strawberries to eat you’d supposedly be vaguely reminded of the taste of watermelons but I say good luck with that since you’d have a hard enough time just getting them down!
(Ben Taylor is the caretaker at Camp Salmen Nature Park, which is located on Hwy. 190 across from the Grand Theater, and writes a weekly column to talk about some of the features that the camp offers, which is open to the public. Information can be found at www.campsalmennaturepark.org.)