Upwardly Mobile Strawberry
May 13, 2008 by fruitforum
I sometimes grow strawberries from seed scraped off the skin of the fruit. The results are variable, fruit comes in all shapes and sizes, and flavour is anything from excellent to wet cardboard; but hitherto the seedlings have always behaved like strawberries. Now, however, I have one that thinks it is a raspberry and is going straight up. The plant is two years old and has not yet produced blossom. When it eventually comes, is the fruit likely to be something out of the ordinary?
Jim Streeton
I would expect a very wide range of variation in a progeny from such seed, but there is no way that a strawberry plant can give rise to a raspberry-like seedling. The seedling shown in Jim Streeton’s photograph looks very much like a true raspberry which has yet to flower. I get these too, and have no doubt that they come from true raspberry seeds that have somehow contaminated the original strawberry fruit at some stage in the process. I have both strawberry and raspberry progenies being worked upon at the same time.
The solution is to grow the seedling until it flowers and produces fruit i.e. until the autumn if it is a primocane-fruiting kind or until next year if it is not. I think its true kind will then become more obvious. But my bet is that it is a true raspberry unrelated to the strawberry.
As much as it pains me, because it would be very, very cool if this was actually a strawberry plant, I have to agree with Derek. If this picture had not been captioned as a strawberry it would never have occurred to any one that this was anything but a raspberry. Are there any traits (other than having come from what was supposed to be strawberry seed) that make you think its something other than a standard raspberry plant? Have any other pictures to show us?
All that said, I would hesitate to go as far as saying ‘there is no way that a strawberry plant can give rise to a raspberry-like seedling’. It all depends, of course, on the definition of ‘raspberry-like’, but two possibilities occur to me (these are very, very low likelihood possibilities, mind you):
- Luther Burbank produced raspberry-strawberry hybrids which produced canes (eventually) with leaves intermediate between the two species.
- I haven’t actually seen such a thing before, but it’s possible that a mutation could result in a strawberry with elongated internodes rather than the normal compressed stem structure. I have no idea what this would actually look like, but I would imagine it would be vaguely Rubus-like. I think this possibility is probably even more unlikely than the very unlikely intergeneric hybrid possibility, in part because as an octoploid there’s enough backup copies of everything that a mutation with such a profound effect is pretty unlikely (though not impossible).
I think I must resign myself to the likelihood that it is a raspberry, though how the seed got in is difficult to imagine. I do not now remember where the original fruit came from, but it may have been Leicester Market. If so, I suppose, there would have been opportunity for contamination there.
The plant is continuing to grow in exactly the same manner and is now about 3ft 6in. There is no sign of blossom, so I imagine that will not now come till next year. When it does put in an appearance I shall watch it with the greatest interest - at least until - as I now fully expect - it turns out to be a perfectly ordinary raspberry. But, in the meantime, I can’t help harbouring a tiny hope for something else. If something strange appears this Blog will be the first to know!