Holy vesca, Batman!

I just stumbled across a site that offers seeds of a stunning range of Fragaria vesca (a diploid species of strawberry) varieties. I have never seen so many available in one place...it's hard enough to find at all.

Alpine Strawberries

They also have a blog, which is entirely useless and empty, but I'll link to it anyway:

Alpine Strawberries Blog

I am so going to order about a zillion varieties of these. I have 'Mignonette' germinating on a window sill right now (the first cotyledons popped up a few days ago!) and I used to have 'Alexandria' and 'Yellow Wonder' at home and Hawaii-4 in the lab, but none of these made the cross-country trip (some of them didn't even live that long...turns out vesca isn't happy outside under the Florida sun.)

For completists bent on getting their hands on every last vesca variety, you might also try 'Intensity' from Oikos Tree Crops.

Of course, you could also turn to the USDA repository in Corvallis, but try not to use that when you can buy them commercially...

Update: Strangely, the best page on the whole site, the one I stumbled onto via Google, doesn't seem to be linked to from anywhere inside, or if it is, I can't seem to find it (and the site map link is broken). So to make sure you don't miss it, here it is.

Update 2:A friend just wrote to me to warn me that his browser is giving him a "phishing" warning when he goes to the alpine strawberry site. Although I've corresponded with the proprietor and feel fairly safe that this site and the PayPal links within it are legit, I have not yet done business with them, so I can't truly vouch for it. I think it's probably fine, but I wanted to pass the info along.