Strawberry season is here!

Strawberries? In November? Have I been nibbling toadstools again?

Well, here's the evidence, which I photographed last week in the fabulous winter garden at the National Trust's Anglesey Abbey in Cambridgeshire.

You'll notice these are not the strawberries one would douse in cream while watching Andy Murray lose at Wimbledon. Oh no, these are the fruit of the Strawberry Tree, Arbutus unedo.

I covered it in the Small Tree section of my Gardening for Wildlife book, and seeing it in action again reaffirmed my view that it is a great little 'worker' when it comes to gardening for wildlife. It was the last weekend in October, and yet there it was, with fruit dangling all over it, awaiting Blackbirds and other thrushes to take advantage of the harvest.

But the great thing about this plant is that it chooses to be extra generous in late autumn by flowering now too. The berries are actually the result of last year's flowers, so all around them are clusters of this year's strange little pale closed-bell flowers. The fact that those flowers are so reminiscent of those of Bilberry is no coincidence, for the Strawberry Tree is in the same family - the heathers. And at Anglesey Abbey, their nectar was providing welcome succour for the last bees of the season, and a couple of Red Admiral butterflies too. 

If you'd like to grow it, the Strawberry Tree is nice and compact, it's slow-growing, evergreen (great cover for birds), and rarely reaches higher than about 5 metres (15 feet). And although it is basically a Mediterranean plant, it is actually native to the British Isles, although it's natural range here is only in southern Ireland.

Give it a nice, sheltered position where it will get plenty of sunshine (goodness knows how it copes in Ireland ;-) And make sure the soil is free-draining to prevent those roots getting waterlogged and frozen in winter. And then you too can have strawberries in the autumn. Just one word of advice - you can eat them if you want, they certainly won't kill you, but the Latin name 'unedo' is said to indicate their palatability - it apparently means 'only eat one'!