Ask Mr. Smarty Plants

That's a very good question. This article on How Plants are Named from Sterling Morton Library at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, IL gives you some background on where the scientific names come from, as well as trade names and cultivars. What we refer to as the "common name" is where it can get confusing. The same plant can have different common names in two neighboring towns, or clear around the world. We're betting that the scenario here is that a botanist or plant hunter, visiting and writing about plants of North America, spotted a plant that looked like a strawberry plant to him while he was visiting Virginia. So, he called it a Virginia strawberry. Then, later, he might have been in Massachusetts or New Hampshire, seen a similar plant and said, "Oh, wow, lookie there, another Virginia strawberry."  Since he probably wrote a diary or published letters about his find, that became a common name for a plant which just happens to also be native to 49 other states, Washington DC and including Virginia, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. At some point it was assigned a scientific or Latin name so that people everywhere could refer to the same plant, in this case, Fragaria virginiana (Virginia strawberry), and in our Native Plant Database the word "Duchesne" is attached to it. That may have been the name of the plant hunter, we just don't know. Plant nurseries sometimes dream up fancy names for plants they have for sale, or descriptive terms, which may even be trademarked. Sometimes the plants are hybridized and no longer are the same plant with the same Latin name as the original. But your original question had to do with Virginia wild strawberries growing in New Hampshire and Massachusetts and yes, they do, as well as Virginia and all those other states.