The garden strawberry was first bred in Brittany, France, in the 1750s via a cross of F. virginiana from eastern North America and F. chiloensis, which was brought from Chile by Amédée-François Frézier in 1714.

Strawberries appear in Italian, Flemish, and German paintings, including Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.

It has been understood to symbolise the ephemerality of earthly joys or the benefit that blessed souls get from religion, or to allegorise death and resurrection.

[3] In the gardens of the Palace of Versailles, France, Antoine Nicolas Duchesne found in 1766 that F. ananassa was a hybrid of the recently arrived F. chiloensis and F.

Adoption of perpetual flowering hybrids not sensitive to changes in photoperiod gave higher yields and enabled production in California to expand.

From a botanical point of view, it is not a berry but an aggregate accessory fruit, because the fleshy part is derived from the receptacle.

[16] In plant breeding and farming, emphasis is placed on sugars, acids, and volatile compounds, which improve the taste and fragrance of the ripe fruit.

[18][19] As strawberry flavour and fragrance appeal to consumers,[18][19][20] they are used widely in manufacturing, including foods, beverages, perfumes and cosmetics.

[23] The most common form of this reaction is oral allergy syndrome, but symptoms may also mimic hay fever or include dermatitis or hives, and, in severe cases, may cause breathing problems.

[24] Proteomic studies indicate that the allergen may be tied to a protein for the red anthocyanin biosynthesis expressed in strawberry ripening, named Fra a1 (Fragaria allergen1).

[31] Strawberry cultivars vary widely in size, colour, flavour, shape, degree of fertility, season of ripening, liability to disease and constitution of plant.

[28] In 2022, world production of strawberries was 9.6 million tonnes, led by China with 35 percent of the total and the United States and Turkey as other significant producers.

[32] Due to the relatively fragile nature of the strawberry, approximately 35 percent of the $2.2 billion United States crop was spoiled in 2020.

One method of cultivation uses annual plasticulture;[34] another is a perennial system of matted rows or mounds which has been used in cold growing regions for many years.

[38] Similar results in an earlier study conducted by United States Department of Agriculture confirms how compost plays a role in the bioactive qualities of two strawberry cultivars.

[41] Strawberries will not grow indoors in winter though an experiment using a combination of blue and red LED lamps shows that this could be achieved in principle.

[46] The following cultivars have gained the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit: Over 200 species of pest arthropods attack strawberries.

[60] Strawberries were eaten fresh with cream in the time of Thomas Wolsey in the court of King Henry VIII.

[67] The Roman poet Ovid wrote that in the past Golden Age, people had lived on wild fruits such as mountain strawberries.

[68] Virgil wrote in his Eclogues that "Ye who cull flowers and low-growing strawberries, / Away from here lads; a chill snake lurks in the grass", and his imagery was taken up by medieval and early modern writers, the snake beneath the strawberry standing for dangerous literature, or beautiful but unfaithful women, or eventually any risky pleasure.

[69] In the work of the late medieval painter Hieronymus Bosch, strawberries feature in The Garden of Earthly Delights amongst "frolicking nude figures".

[68] Fray Jose de Siguenza described the painting as embodying the strawberry as a symbol of the ephemerality of earthly joys.

[68] More recently, scholars have seen the symbolism entirely differently: Clément Wertheim-Aymes believed it meant the blessed souls' benefit from religion; Pater Gerlach supposed it meant spiritual love; and Laurinda Dixon asserted it was part of an allegory of death and resurrection.