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Harmless🍽️ Edible💊 Medicinal

🍓 Wild strawberry

Fragaria vesca · Rosaceae

🏔️ Mountains
🧠 To remember it“The false strawberry holds its head high, the real one bows to the sky” — the position of the fruit (drooping on the real strawberry, upright on the yellow imposter) tells them apart at a glance.
Wild strawberry — Fragaria vesca

🔍 Identify it without mistakes

Small, low perennial plant, 10 to 20 cm high, forming clumps connected by thin creeping runners. Trifoliate leaves (3 toothed leaflets) on long downy petioles, growing in a rosette at ground level. White flowers with 5 petals and a yellow center, followed by a tiny, highly fragrant red strawberry; the achenes (seeds) stay on the fruit's surface rather than being pitted like in cultivated strawberries.

  1. downy, toothed, trifoliate leaves on long petioles
  2. creeping runners connecting clumps
  3. tiny fruit (1-1.5 cm), achenes on the surface, not sunken
  4. intense and sweet scent, far superior to cultivated strawberries
Size10-20 cm
FloweringApril-July
Habitatclearings, forest edges, and sunny banks from plains to the subalpine zone, throughout temperate and mountainous Europe

⚠️ Not to be confused with

Mock strawberry (Potentilla indica (Duchesnea))aucun (non-toxic but tasteless, insipid fruit)

To tell them apart: yellow flowers (not white) on the mock strawberry, fruit pointing upwards (not drooping) and virtually tasteless

🍽️ Eating it

Partsripe fruit, leaves (herbal tea)
SeasonJune-August
Tastefruit: highly aromatic, much more intense and sweeter than cultivated strawberries

Preparation : raw fruit, dried leaves as an infusion

32kcalEnergy
0.7gProtein
0.3gFat
7.7gCarbs
58.8mgVitamin C
0.4mgIron
16mgCalcium

USDA FoodData Central, raw strawberry, per 100 g — wild strawberry is even richer in aromatics for the same weight

💊 Healing with it

leaves traditionally used in herbal tea for digestion and as a mild astringent (mild diarrhea)

Level of evidence : traditional use — Traditional European herbal medicine literature

⚠️ no known major contraindications at traditional doses

Sources (2)

No entry replaces a certain identification in the field, or medical advice. When in doubt: don't eat it. If ingestion is suspected: poison control or 112/911.