The strawberry harvest is in full swing right now, as the warming weather and lengthening days of spring speed ripening. In about a month, the California Strawberry Festival will get under way in Oxnard, celebrating the sweet fruit that ranks as the county's top crop.

Except it's not a fruit. Not technically, anyway. Strawberries are peculiar plants.

As defined by botanists, a fruit is the ripened ovary of a flowering plant. The fruit itself is the fleshy or woody coating surrounding the fertilized seeds, which contain the embryos that will develop into a new generation of plants.

But the red "fruit" produced by a strawberry plant is not the ripened ovary; it is the swollen base of the flower, where the petals, stamens and pistils join together. Technically, that makes the strawberry "fruit" a vegetable.

After fertilization, the expanding strawberry carries the true fruits of the plant partially embedded in its surface. We call these seeds. They're not. What we refer to as strawberry "seeds" are actually the strawberry fruits; the true seeds are enclosed within them. The scientific term for this type of seed is an achene.

Strawberry plants are members of the same botanical family as roses, and strawberries are a lot like rose hips. They develop pretty much the same way, the main difference being that the rose hip develops a concave form that encloses the fruit of the rose flower, whereas a strawberry develops a convex shape.

A strawberry, in other words, is a rose hip turned inside out. It's not a fruit but a vegetable, and the seeds are not seeds but fruit.

None of that changes how they taste.