Lois Summers, age 10, of New Martinsville, W. Virginia, for her question:

Where did strawberries grow first?

Long before people took to farming, various wild strawberries grew almost every¬where in the world. People loved them, even though their sweet fragrant berries were no bigger than peanuts. In Roman days, slaves were sent out to gather them in the woods. In the 1600s, English peasants picked them in the country and sold them to rich Londoners for $30 a pound. But it seems that the best wild strawberries always grew in the New World    in North, Central and South America.

In the late 1700s, botanists crossed certain native wild strawberries from the Americas and Hawaii. They started cultivating bigger and better garden varieties. But these were not the first. Ages ago, the clever farmers of Chile cultivated garden strawberries as big as walnuts. The little wild strawberries grew almost everywhere. But so far as we know, the first big garden strawberries grew in Chile, on the slopes of the South American Andes.