230 TREATISE ON FRUIT TREES. 



or more commonly the Montreuil strawberry plant, M. du Chesne calls it Fressant's 

 strawberry plant from the name of the first nurseryman who cultivated it. Is it a different 

 type than the common strawberry plant? Is it a variety of it? If it throws out a few more 

 suckers, if its leaves are somewhat larger & their stalks longer, if the fruit is bigger & 

 generally more distorted and its flowers & the sections of the calyx more subject to 

 certain abnormalities, all the differences are very small in one direction or another so that 

 one can't determine a point or stage that's particular to each one. Perhaps to some degree 

 they should simply be attributed to the method of cultivation. Indeed, a common 

 strawberry plant transplanted from the wild into good soil in a kitchen garden grows as 

 big, or almost as big, as a Montreuil strawberry plant, & some of its fruit also reaches the 

 same size. This happens especially when the former had been taken from an area where 

 charcoal was produced or where there was some other activity where ash fertilized the 

 soil. It's no surprise that the same strawberry plant raised & cultivated in improved & 

 well-prepared soil does much better all around when brought into a kitchen garden. This 

 is particularly true for the soil of Montreuil & its vicinity, where the residents combine 

 the benefits of the soil, that seems to be created expressly for strawberry plants & peach 

 trees, with long experience & admirable expertise in cultivation. In ground less favorable 

 for strawberry plants, the Ville-du-bois plant offers very little or no advantage at all over 

 one from the wild, & the fruit is always less fragrant. Even though these differences aren't 

 very great & can be unpredictable, nevertheless this strawberry plant is believed to be a 

 definite variety of the wild strawberry plant. A sub-variety of it has white fruit. 



There's another more highly regarded cultivated variety of it that has bigger fruit, 

 more fragrance, & is a very deep red-brown. It's called Big black 



