Odd

MrsM's brother and his wife have bought a new house; we were invited to come and see inside. The only furniture so far is four dining room chairs that the old occupant left behind. With the aid of garden ornaments, an empty cardboard box and some camping equipment, six of us sat down to a fine lunch

The house has briars with ripe blackberries on, canes in a cage with raspberries on, trees with apples, pears and plums on, spearmint and thyme; and a strawberry bed, so these were dessert. Who cares about the underfloor heating, air-source heat pump and triple-glazed bi-fold doors? I think it's a delicious house

Have you spotted the oddity? One of them has a haulm at one end and a green shoot at the other (actually there was a second shoot, but it's concealed by the adjacent strawberry). I was curious and learned things I should have known but didn't:

It's not that unusual for strawberries to sprout green leaves, apparently, but more often there are a lot of small ones all over the fruit, rather than a couple of shoots. The phenomenon - not confined to strawberries - is called 'vivipary', which simply means the sprouting of seeds that are in some way still attached to the parent plant

Then another word I have never heard: the 'seeds' embedded in the surface of a strawberry are not correctly called 'seeds' at all; they are 'achenes', which means a small dried up fruit. Each achene contains an ovary which contains a tiny seed within it. Furthermore, the red flesh in which the achenes are embedded - delicious though it was - is technically neither a fruit nor a berry; it is a swollen flower axis called a 'receptacle'

The house is number 7, but that's not all that helpful because the previous occupant took the number from beside the front door with him. Better than taking the strawberry plants