New strawberry species discovered in Cascades, hidden in a plant bank in Corvallis

[alp227]

In 1981, Ronald Reagan started his first term, MTV aired its first music video and Otto Jahn, a researcher for the Agricultural Research Service, carried back a tiny strawberry plant from Hoodoo mountain in the upper Cascades.

Jahn curated a plant bank, the National Clonal Germplasm Repository in Corvallis, which is home to the national collections of strawberries, pears, blueberries and hops, to name a few. He planted it there, assuming it was a common wild strawberry, Fragaria virginiana.

Twenty-six years later, new research sweetened Jahn's find.

That plant is the newest addition to the wild strawberry family, F. cascadensis. Kim Hummer, who took over the plant bank after Jahn retired, says the secret to the new strawberry species lies in its two extra sets of chromosomes, making it a rather uncommon strawberry after all.

The findings were highlighted in this month's Agricultural Research magazine.

full: http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2013/07/new_strawberry_species_discove.html

[Bette Noir]

1. I've seen wild strawberries in the Cascades lots of times.

I wonder how many of them were the "new" species?