No, this question does not question the spelling of children’s favorite fruit, but sometimes reality is more than fiction. Indeed, Captain François Amédée Frezier – an authentic name that can’t be invented – was the inventor of the modern strawberry. Here’s the story.
In 1712, he was commissioned by the King to study (i.e., spy on) the coastal and port fortifications along the coasts of Peru and Chile, then Spanish possessions. Whether he developed a taste for botanical exploration out of boredom or fear of being discovered by the enemy is unclear. In any case, it was in Conception, in the viceroyalty of Peru, now Chile, that he discovered a new species of strawberry (Fragaria chiloensis), white and heart-shaped, originally from the island of Chiloe.
Despite his hasty return, following the Treaty of Utrecht in 1714, he brought several plants of these new strawberry plants back to France. As a good servant of the king, he offered them to the elderly Louis XIV, who was already a strawberry fanatic. These strawberries were the result of a cross between wild strawberries and strawberries discovered by Jacques Cartier in Virginia in the previous century. The monarch immediately had them cultivated by his head gardener La Quintinie in the King’s kitchen garden at Versailles. The wise engineer also kept a few plants for the Brest botanical garden of the famous naturalist Antoine de Jussieu, not forgetting to plant them in his garden in Plougastel, northern Brittany, where they spread successfully, followed today by the new remontant varieties.
This is how the white strawberries of Chiloé came to take on a beautiful red color, thanks to the naturalist’s know-how. They are the origin of all modern non-remontant strawberry plants, which could well have been called “fréziers”. The captain-spy-naturalist-gardener wouldn’t have missed it.