Squash

Cucurbita spp. includes a wide range of squashes, gourds, and pumpkins. They have been cultivated around the world from the dawn of recorded time and well before. Their genetic diversity is primordial and science has difficulty classifying them neatly. Roughly speaking, we can distinguish the pumpkins, round and often ridged, the long zucchini type, and the summer squashes, hard-shelled and often used as containers.

Nearly thirty years ago, my paternal grandfather coaxed the normally trailing vine of Cucurbita pepo to climb up a cherry tree and grow a pumpkin. It was not a very large or pretty fruit, but it was mentioned on the garden page of the Detroit News. Since then I have always thought I had inherited special insight into pumpkins. Lately, though, after looking into the subject more thoroughly (my research until this summer had consisted almost entirely of eating pumpkin pies and carving jack-o’-lanterns), I am not so sure. Perhaps more than any other edible plant, the common field pumpkin, which shines from every right-thinking American’s living room window on Halloween, illustrates the clash between colloquial naming and official botanical nomenclature. And that is only the beginning of the pumpkin enigma. Although you may resist the vulgar error of thinking of pumpkins as vegetables, can you so easily adjust to the scientifically unassailable notion that these giant gourds are berries?