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BARREN STRAWBERRY
Potentilla sterilis
Family ROSACEAE
To be found on banks, dry pastures and in open woods, the Barren Strawberry is one of the earliest of the flowering plants to make its presence known.
It is often mistaken by the rambler for the true Wild Strawberry, owing to the close resemblance of leaf and flower.
The Barren Strawberry has a blanching rootstock, with a tuft of silky radical leaves and hairy stalks, without the deeply sunken nerve lines of the leaf and the long runners, with young plants attached, of the Wild Strawberry; but when the fruit is formed there is no difficulty in distinguishing one from the other.
The leaves consist of three leafiets, regularly toothed almost all round. The white flowers are supported on somewhat erect hairy stems, with five small notched petals, narrow and scarcely as long as the calyx.
The receptacle does not swell and become juicy and red as in the Wild Strawberry, but is a barren counterfeit of a mere cluster of dry achenes.
Flowering in early spring.
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Occasionally the flowers may be found with undivided petais, and rarely the flowers are white. The flowers produce nectar, and the stamens come to maturity before strawberry Barren the stigmas, thus favouring cross-fertilization. The flowering period is from May to August. Beyond being wellestablished in Suffolk and the Southern Counties, it is not one of native plants Barren strawberry, but an immigrant from the Continent. It is found about the lightened soil of our cornfields, especially those upon a chalky sub soil.
The stipules are half arrow-shaped. The flowers are pale purple, and are produced in clusters of four to six, on short stems, from the axils strawberry Barren of the leaves. The style has a dense tuft of hairs under the stigma on the outer side, with a few short hairs on the opposite side. The smooth, blackish Barren strawberry seed-pod is about an inch long, with a beak, and contains about eight seeds. Flowering from June to September.
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