Little Italian alpine strawberries from your garden will put market berries to shame for flavor, and now is the time to get them started.

"DOUBTLESS God could have made a better berry," noted William Butler in the 17th century, "but doubtless God never did." Still, God did make some bigger strawberries, and not long after Butler penned those words about the tiny berries native to Europe, French botanists were hybridizing Chilean and North American strains to produce plumper and more prolific specimens. But sadly, as berries grew larger, they grew more insipid, and while some of the bigger berries are pretty darn good, none of them match the flavor or charm of those tiny wild ones the French call Fraises de bois, or woodland strawberries.

My first encounter with the wild ones came on the slopes of Mount Baker when I was a college student in Bellingham. I went hiking with a friend from work. We built a fire, ate bread and cheese and slept on the ground. Then, in the morning, we swam in the river and we breakfasted on the berries we found along the trail as we headed home. The strawberries were so small that they amounted to nothing in the way of sustenance. Twenty of those specks would have to be piled together to match one big California strawberry, but each tiny strawberry packed more flavor than a pint-sized basket of their swollen cousins.

Dreaming of strawberries? If you'd like to harvest your own tiny strawberries this summer, it's not too early to think about planting. Seeds of the Italian alpine strawberry, a variety offered by Territorial Seed Co. of Cottage Grove, Ore., can be planted in late February or early March. Officially, germination takes two to three weeks but can last as long as a month. Generally only 60 percent of seeds sprout, unlike the 93 percent common to other strawberries. Seedlings can be potted after another three to four weeks and transplanted after the danger of frost has passed. The plants grow in clusters and don't have runners, making them excellent for a limited patch, border, rock garden or container. Simple white flowers give way to clusters of red berries that float just under the stems. Because they're so lightweight, the little berries hover above the ground, keeping them out of the spring and autumn mud. When they're plucked from their star-shaped stems, a sun-drenched perfume wafts up, the scent of summer. Berries on first-year plants may ripen until late July, but established plants can bear from late April into November and even early December. With a healthy dose of manure and compost in early spring, an Italian alpine strawberry patch will flourish for years. Colvos Creek Nursery (206-749-9508) on Vashon Island often stocks Alpine strawberry plants in May (about $3 for several plants in a 4-inch pot). A 1/8-gram (approximately 300 to 325 seeds) sampler packet from Territorial Seed is $2.25, 1 gram (2,500 seeds) is $6.15 and 1/8 ounce (8,750 seeds) is $13.10. The Territorial Seed Company, P.O. Box 158, Cottage Grove, OR 97424-0061 (phone orders 541-942-9547; fax orders 888-657-3131; www.territorial-seed.com).

It's no wonder that Butler said what he did, and little wonder that people went to the trouble of planting them even when the best varieties available yielded fruits hardly any larger than those wild ones. When I worked for few short days at Roger Verge's then three-star Michelin-rated Moulin de Mougins, tiny berries no bigger than thimbles were delivered to the back door of the restaurant. Some were still attached to little tendrils of the vine that apparently came off when the berries were plucked, and some still bore white, five-petaled blossoms close to their crowns, for strawberries don't ripen all at once. I don't know where they came from in the middle of November, or what the restaurant must have had to pay for them, but judging from the buzz that accompanied their arrival, they were worth whatever superhuman efforts it took to get them there.

The best-looking specimens were quickly claimed by the pastry chef for dessert garnishes and the rest were secreted away to the laboratoire behind the restaurant to be transformed into sorbet. The dessert plates at that restaurant were replicas of the writer George Sand's china from Limoges and on the border of the plates were hand-painted fraises de bois that looked exactly like the real ones. To see a dessert garnished with a scoop of that sorbet in its porcelain-thin cookie cup and a few of the tiny berries themselves, delivered to the table on one of those plates, was to understand in a flash the art of fine dining. There are moments when haute cuisine has little to do with nourishing the body and everything to do with feeding the soul. When strawberries are involved, those moments can happen in a great restaurant, on a trail in the woods, or even in a suburban backyard.

Fifteen years ago, my in-laws moved out of the big house on the lake where they raised their five girls and settled into a smaller rambler at the end of a quiet cul de sac. The house is surrounded by edible landscaping. Gravenstein apple, Japanese pear apple and Italian prune trees are tucked between the giant rhododendrons. An arbor outside the master bedroom is laden every October with plump, black Concord grapes, and a short row of blueberry bushes occupy one corner of the small backyard. In all the beds, are clumps of violets and rambling vines of tiny strawberries that look and taste just like the alpine variety I ate on that trail beside Mount Baker.

"They're not good for much," insisted my father-in-law when they moved in. But that opinion never stopped him from nurturing the plants and keeping them free of weeds over the years.

In a way, my father-in-law was right when he said they were good for nothing. Even at the peak of their laughable harvest time in early summer, anyone would be hard-pressed to gather more than enough to fill the palm of one hand. No one in their right mind would try to make a batch of jam, or even a proper strawberry tart from these berries. And yet, who could resist one or two popped into the mouth while walking around the yard.

When we came into our garden on Bainbridge Island, my wife and I took starts from the berries at her parents' house and we planted another woodland variety that was given to us by a friend. The tiny plants are almost lost in our big garden, but tucked here beside a variegated pineapple-scented mint and there beneath an old pink rose called `Cecile Bruner' they are worth seeking out. Especially when children are involved.

Last year, my wife had a tea party for the little girls who live in our neighborhood. She put fancy napkins and our fanciest china cups on the little table in the garden and brought out a tray with herb tea, milk and sugar, miniature scones and rose-petal jelly. The boys and I were not allowed anywhere near the proceedings but I heard rumors that the girls, both of them pre-schoolers, wore their finest dresses and carried little purses to the party.

This year, I'm hoping we'll harvest enough tiny woodland strawberries to make miniature tarts for the girls, or maybe even tiny little strawberry shortcakes. I know it's for girls only, but even if I can't be there, I want it to happen. I want the girls to cherish the little berries as if they were magical, and to hold the moment in our garden as precious as a dinner in that French restaurant. I want them to tell their children that God never made a better berry than the ones they ate from our garden. And even more than that, I want them to plant their own someday and remember.

Greg Atkinson, Canlis executive chef, is the author of "In Season" (1997) and "The Northwest Essentials Cookbook" (1999) from Sasquatch Books.