The strawberry genies

my tiny wild crop from the garden

Just below the back garden hedges in the summer grow the straggly plants that must be the product of bird droppings as no one else has planted them and they aren’t weeds blown in from afar. A few greedy birds over the past few years must have been eating strawberries and shitting below my hedge as every year I have a wee crop of wild strawberries.

They are tiny wee things in amongst the the multiple green leaves of the plant, they grow red quite quickly and I have to rush out and get them before the offspring of the the birds that dropped the seeds there in the first place eat them before me.

I probably could cut them back to do something to get a better crop but I like the idea that they just are. They exist under a clipped hedge in a suburban garden and the only thing I do to the plants is nothing. The fruit they give me is tiny, and I get about six or seven of them at a time that half fill the palm of my hand. Unlike cultivated strawberries their taste isn’t very consistent but sometimes I put one in my mouth and it fills it with what feels like the most expensive perfume in the world. I half expect a genie to appear saying he was trapped in the strawberry and now that I have released him, what are my wishes. The strawberries the supermarket are selling this year are some of the best in years, probably due to the very warm Spring earlier in the year, but they are about eight times the size of the ones in the garden and taste soggy and bland compared to the tiny wee perfumed marvels I sometimes get from the garden. I am having to eat the bought new with orange juice and rosewater, or thick double cream.

Oh how I suffer.