May 28, 2024, 3:03 pm | Read time: 3 minutes
The ending of the name “strawberry” is misleading. It suggests that it must be a berry. However, that’s not true. Biologically, the strawberry is an aggregate fruit. myHOMEBOOK reveals the background.
In school, we learn many basic things about plants. But what is considered basic knowledge there often turns out to be a small untruth—or at least a mix-up. For example, roses don’t have thorns, but prickles. And cacti have spines and not prickles. But this article isn’t about that. Instead, it’s about a widespread misconception in the realm of nuts, berries, and fruits. The strawberry is actually a nut, the coconut a fruit, and the banana a berry. If you’re confused now, you should keep reading attentively.
Berries Develop from the Carpels of Plants
Everything small, round, and sweet to sour in taste must be a berry. Or so one might think. However, the classification isn’t that simple. In botany, fruits that develop from the carpels are considered berries. The carpel is located at the center of the flower. After pollination and fertilization, this inner part of the flower grows, becomes fleshy and juicy, and thus develops into the soft fruit flesh.
The fruit flesh encloses the hard core inside. True berries include currants or blueberries. But tomatoes and bananas are also considered berries botanically. If you cut open a strawberry, you won’t find a core. Therefore, it cannot be a berry.
By the way: If the core inside the fruit is woody, it is a stone fruit. This includes peaches, plums, nectarines, and apricots. The coconut is also not a nut but a stone fruit. When thinking of coconuts, the image of the brown, hard part with the delicious white flesh inside quickly comes to mind. This is the woody core. The fruit flesh is removed before sale in local supermarkets. On the palm tree, the cores of coconuts are protected by green fruit flesh—typical of stone fruits.
Botanically, Strawberries Are False Fruits
To understand why strawberries are not berries, it’s worth looking at the development of the strawberry. Unlike true berries, the fleshy, red part of the strawberry does not develop from the ovary but from the receptacle. After pollination and fertilization, this part of the flower swells and becomes the sweet part of the strawberry that many people love to snack on.
Now to the actual fruits of the strawberry—the small, yellow seeds that sit on the receptacle. Strawberries are nuts or so-called aggregate fruits. They have not just one, but several nut fruits. But why so many? In the strawberry, each individual ovule in the ovary is pollinated and fertilized. From these, the small nuts, also called achenes, develop.
Good to know: Raspberries and blackberries are aggregate stone fruits. They consist of several small stone fruits.