IMPOSTER
Oops. Turns out that what I thought was “wild strawberry” is an imposter. The Google search told me that wild strawberry has white flowers and small, delicious berries. The alleged strawberry in my garden has yellow flowers and tasteless berries. As its Latin name, Potentilla indica suggests (indica meaning: from India) this plant is originally from Asia. It’s just pretending to be strawberry and so the common name: mock strawberry.
I quickly updated the narration:
- Clover and violets wild strawberry are considered weeds. But I let them be.
I made this discovery late last summer while I was busy finalizing WILD in the Garden State. By then it was too hot and miserable to do much weeding. Besides, mock strawberry looks nice with deep green leaves, and pretty berries. It was brought to North America as an ornamental.
Flash forward to our first ever WILD garden tour this spring. A young girl excitedly announced “I found a strawberry!” I replied: “it’s not really a strawberry and…” She added: “It doesn’t taste good.” (It’s safe to eat; just tasteless.) The garden tour continued, and now — because it’s ripe, red berries were stood out against all the lush spring growth — I could suddenly see bright red mock strawberries EVERYWHERE…. mocking me.
Until the garden tour, I had continued to ignore it. I thought I’ll get to it later. I had important DESIGN work to do.
Potentilla indica has an insidious way of replicating. Runners extend out from a mother plant until they reach a new patch of soil. As soon as they hit “pay dirt” they send down roots. The plant forms a network of sister plants. In the lawn this network lays low. But once it has reached across the lawn into a garden bed, mock strawberry suddenly rears up like a monster. No longer mowed down, the weed uses the garden plants as a trellis to reach sunlight, while a network of runners reaches for soil.
Any place that was a bit shady and damp the mock strawberry was rearing up and strangling the Black-eyed Susans, Little Bluestems, and Cardinal flowers. Even the prolific Golden Alexanders were struggling in the battle.
It was a slow, full-scale invasion that I let happen while I fancied myself a garden designer.
HUMBLED
In a bit of a panic, I began to weed. And weed. I spent hours every day weeding. I’d return to a patch I thought I’d done and find the classic Potentilla indica three-leaves (trifoliate) connected to a runner.
I googled “how to weed mock strawberry” and found this article helpful: https://durhammastergardeners.com/2019/06/26/i-must-stop-the-mock-strawberry-duchesnea-indica/ The author, Wendy Diaz, had the same experience I had of mistaking it at first for Wild Strawberry. Wendy explained it’s best to weed mock strawberry after a rain.