Facts and Trivia about Strawberries

Here's a list of fun and interesting strawberry facts and trivia:

Madame Tallien - She used to bathe in strawberry juice

• A strawberry has, on average, 200 seeds
• If all the strawberries produced in California, in one year, were laid berry to berry, they'd wrap around the world 15 times
• Strawberries are the only fruit with seeds on the outside. It is argued that for this reason, it cannot be considered a real berry, since berries carry seeds on the inside
• Ninety-four percent of U.S. households consume strawberries at least once a year
• Strawberries often gain top positions in surveys as the favorite fruit: in 2007 over 53 percent of seven to nine-year-olds picked strawberries as their favorite fruit
• A French noblewoman at the time of Napoleon, Madame Tallien, used to bathe regularly in strawberry juice, using 22 pounds per basin. She didn't bathe daily though
• Strawberries have a long-dated history of medical uses, the Romans for instance used them to alleviate symptoms of fainting, kidney stones, inflammation, diseases of the blood, liver and spleen, throat infections, bad breath, attacks of gout, melancholy and fever
• The etymology of the name "strawberry" is still largely unproven: some argue that they were named in the nineteenth-century by English children who picked the berries, strung them on grass straws and sold them as "Straws of berries". Others theorize that the name was derived from the nineteenth-century practice of placing straw around the growing berry plants to protect the ripening fruit
• Charles V of France ordered, in the 14th century, that twelve hundred strawberry plants be grown in the Royal Gardens of the Louvre
• Strawberries are the first fruit to ripen in spring
• Strawberries were a symbol of perfection and love: for instance, folklore says that if you split a double strawberry in half and share it with a member of the opposite sex, you'll soon fall in love. Medieval stonemasons carved strawberry designs on altars and around the tops of pillars in sacred places such as churches, as a symbol of perfection
• 23,000 acres of strawberries are planted in California each year.
• The world's largest strawberry shortcake is hosted in the annual strawberry festival in Lebanon, Oregon
• In some places of Bavaria, country folk practice a spring ritual of tying small baskets of wild strawberries to the horns of their cattle as an offering to wood elves. The legend states that the elves, who love strawberries, will offer their gratitude producing healthy calves and an abundance of milk
• In Belgium there's a museum entirely dedicated to strawberries
• Strawberries are grown in every state in the United States and every province of Canada.
• The strawberry plant belongs to the same family of roses, genus Fragraria, together with other fruits such as apples and plums. The name of the genus comes from the Old Latin word for "fragrant". In modern Italian, the word for strawberry is still "fragola"
• California produces one billion (yes, with a B!) pounds of strawberries each year