Excerpt
It is said that if you order strawberries in a deluxe Parisian restuarant, those strawberries will be very small and very expensive (but of course!), but also very delicious. Such fruits are not scaled-down or poorly grown versions of common, cultivated strawberries, but different species of near wild strawberries: the alpine strawberry or the musk strawberry.
Alpine and musk strawberry fruits are expensive not because they are hard to grow, but because the plants are not very productive. This should not preclude growing them in the backyard garden, where flavor is as important as productivity. Fruits of the alpine strawberry have an intense, wild strawberry flavor. The flavor of the musk strawberry tastes like a mixture of strawberry, raspberry, and pineapple. Delicious!
For centuries, Europeans planted both species in gardens and harvested them from the wild. Cultivation of alpine and musk strawberries abated two and a half centuries ago with the development of the "modern" strawberry, which is a large-fruited and prolific hybrid of two American species.