Foraging Wild Strawberries

Picking tiny wild strawberries with Danny in our backyard. Since shifting to full-time photography, it’s sometimes been a challenge to motivate to document my personal life like I used to. Between limited hard drive space and seasonal burnout, it’s not often a priority unless I can also think, “it would be nice to have these images in my archive.” So I love it when an editor comes to me with a wishlist of farmy images from Maine, like Tara Rice at Down East Magazine does from time to time. She picked up this first image for their “101 Reasons to Love Summer in Maine” feature for the May 2023 issue.

Wild strawberries are an herbaceous perennial that grow in meadows and woodland edges here in Maine. Archelogical records show that we’ve been eating them since the Stone Age. It took nearly 1,000 years of hybridization and cultivars from two hemispheres to create modern commercial varieties of strawberry, but nothing beats the taste of the wild ones.