Beach Strawberry Fragaria chiloensis
Beach Strawberry is a perennial wildflower native to Canada, Hawaii, and the lower 48 states. It grows to 0.8 ft and blooms Mar in full sun – part shade, with red fruit. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Fragaria chiloensis, the beach strawberry, Chilean strawberry, or coastal strawberry, is one of two species of wild strawberry that were hybridized to create the modern garden strawberry. It is native to the Pacific Ocean coasts of North and South America. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun – part shade
- Soil & moisture
- Medium moisture
- Soil pH
- 5.8–7.8
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 4+
- Height
- 0.8 ft
- Spacing
- 2–4 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Rapid
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Stoloniferous
- Lifespan
- Perennial · moderate
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- Red
- Flower colour
- White AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Seed, Sprigs
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Spring – Summer seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- No known commercial source
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~81 caterpillar species
Fragaria supports ~81 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a strong genus.
Recorded feeding on Fragaria in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees specialist-bee host · 8 bee visitors
Specialist native bees depend on it.
Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen from particular plant genera. Fragaria is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
8 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Beach Strawberry :
+ 2 more bees → ↑ show fewer
Wildlife & visitors 2 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Beach Strawberry — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
2 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Fragaria →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
McKenzie et al. assigned each species a flower colour with a GPT-4V vision model over iNaturalist photos. We use the confident tier plus a separately-labelled lower-confidence top-up (mostly inconspicuous green/brown flowers), and render it as a small tint — never as an asserted fact, and kept out of the written synopsis.
Honest limits: AI image inference (~87% expert agreement on the confident tier); a decorative, confidence-tiered indicator, not a measured trait.
Sources for this entry (37) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
Loading…
BibTeX
Loading…