This little creeper, found in shady lawns everywhere, bears bland, tasteless fruit that looks like wild strawberries, but it’s easily distinguished by its yellow flowers. Children like to tell each other that the fruit is poisonous and then dare each other to eat it. It’s perfectly edible, but not really worth eating. It is nevertheless much valued by herbalists, who suppose it to have useful medicinal properties.

The word “Indian” in the common name of a North American plant often means “not really.” Indian Tobacco is a lobelia; Indian Bean or Indian Stogie is the Catalpa tree. So it comes as a surprise that this plant, which seems to fit perfectly into that pattern, is actually an Asian import, named not for the aboriginal Americans but for India.

Gray describes the genus and the species:

DUCHESNEA Sin. INDIAN STRAWBERRY
Calyx 5-parted, the lobes alternating with much larger foliaceous spreading 3-toothed appendages. Petals 5, yellow. Receptacle in fruit spongy but not juicy. Flowers otherwise as in Fragaria. Perennial herb with leafy runners and 3-foliolate leaves similar to those of the true strawberries. (Dedicated to Antoine Nicolas Duchesne, an early monographer of Fragaria.)

D. indica (Andr.) Focke. Fruit red, insipid. (Fragaria Andr.) Waste ground, grassy places, etc., s. N. Y. and e. Pa. to Fla., Ark., and Mo. (Introd. from Eurasia.)

Thorny canes of blackberry can make the edge of the woods nearly impenetrable, but they reward us with these pretty (though often a bit sloppy) white flowers, and then of course with sweet blackberries. This stand grew at the edge of an old German Lutheran cemetery in Beechview.

Gray describes the genus and the species:

RUBUS [Tourn.] L. BRAMBLE
Calyx 5 (3-7)-parted, without bractlets. Petals 5, deciduous. Stamens numerous. Achenes usually many, collected on a spongy or succulent receptacle, becoming small drupes; styles nearly terminal. Perennial herbs, or somewhat shrubby plants, with white (rarely reddish) flowers, and usually edible fruit. (The Roman name, kindred with ruber, red.)

In June these clusters of white flowers appear along streambanks; these grew along the Peters Trail.

An upright cinquefoil with pale primrose-yellow flowers, probably the showiest of our native cinquefoils. It’s a common wild flower along trails and in vacant lots.

It has no common name, at least no name fit to print. For most of the year this invasive pest is a curse on the landscape. For two weeks in June, it is a heavenly delight, covered with sweet-smelling white roses.