People have eaten different kinds of wild strawberries for thousands of years. In Europe, people usually grew the woodland strawberry. Dutch people learned how to eat them through most of the year by planting their seeds at different times, letting them harvest for 9 months out of 12. The Alpine strawberry became popular around the 1650s because it was a little bigger and could grow in places with less strong sunlight, like the British islands in the late fall. Today's bigger "garden" strawberry was first made around Brest in Brittany (northwest France) in the 1750s. It was made by joining the Virginia strawberry from eastern North America to the European Hautbois and the Chilean strawberry from western South America.