It is, as they say over at McSweeney’s, decorative gourd season…. As a dedicated vegetable lover, the characterization of edible squashes as “gourds” grieves me. We portray them merely as colorful fall decorations, forgetting their history and relationship to humans. Those adorable Jack-Be-Little pumpkins which decorate mantels from Connecticut to California are not only edible, but choice, personal sized squashes. Cook one up, add a dash of butter and maple syrup, and you’ll be amazed. The enormous, ribbed, red squashes gracing haybales everywhere are Boston Marrows. A century ago, when you had to feed a large farm family, plus a few hands, you needed a squash that big for every meal. These fruits were selected and grown as a valuable (and tasty) source of calories which would keep successfully over a long winter. How distressing then, that wagonloads of them are left outdoors overnight, at trendy grocery stores across the country, where they are subject to (shudder) frost!
Americans are generally familiar with three squash species in the genus Cucurbita – the pepos, which have a spiny, six-pointed stem, and are represented by the field pumpkin, the acorns, and summer squashes such as the zucchini:
Peduncle (stem attachment) of Curcurbita pepo the maximas, which have a warty stem, and are represented by hubbards, buttercups, and “giant pumpkins”:
Peduncle of Cucurbita maximas and moschatas, which have button stems, and are best known by the popular butternut.
Regardless of species, all domestic squashes are uniquely American – generally South American. They evolved somewhere warm, and they do still thrive in the heat. However, humans dragged them on up to North America, and along the way we selected for squashes that managed nicely in our more varied seasons. It’s useful to ponder their biology a bit, in order to understand how we should be caring for them.
Consider what the squash is. Each squash is a pepo – botanically, a great big berry which contains a number of seeds. As long as the fruit remains intact, those seeds stay dormant. Once the protective shell of fruit is gone, seeds which are subjected to the right conditions will germinate. Seeds that germinate either grow or they don’t, they get to reproduce and pass down their genetic structures or not, depending on whether they’ve germinated in a fortunate time and place.
Imagine yourself as a pumpkin. Imagine, if you will, that you are sitting in a field in the late autumn sun. The nights are cold, freezing even, and each cold night the water in your cells freezes and breaks cell membranes. As the day warms, that cellular water thaws, then freezes again at night. Eventually, all the cells break, and you collapse as a hunk of goo, sheltering those seeds until spring. This works for you, the pumpkin. After all, what the pumpkin wants is to pass on its genetic information. When things begin to warm up in the spring, the seeds will be conveniently planted just under a nutrient rich layer of pumpkin goo, and up they come - happy baby pumpkins.
What we want, however, is to eat those pumpkins (or to keep them as table decorations at least until Thanksgiving is over – I won’t judge. Much.). In order to prevent them from decomposing, you’ve got to keep them warm. Comfortable room temperature warm. You, standing around in your shirt sleeves warm. Leave one outdoors, subject to freeze and thaw cycles, and you’ll have to shovel it off your front step. Those stores displaying squashes that have sat outside in October are selling you damaged goods. It’s probably fine for your Halloween Jack-O-Lantern (you’re going to let the kids butcher that anyway), but not for a Blue Hubbard, a Triamble, or a Buttercup. Bring those babies in.
It’s more accurate to think of processes and chance when discussing evolutionary success, but it’s more poetic to talk about what the pumpkin wants. It’s more human. We come to care more about the world around us when we imagine ourselves in the place of its inhabitants. That’s one thing poetry can do for us, it can put us in the place of another organism. One of my favorite plant poems does just that. Mark Doty’s “Amagansett Cherry” reminds us that plants have their own agenda, and they don’t much care about ours.
Amagansett Cherry
Praise to the cherry on the lawn of the library,
the heave and contorted thrust of it, a master,
on its own root, negating the word weeping
(miles to the nearest tears),
requiring instead down-fountaining,
or descending from a ferocious intention.
Whatever twists the trunk
subsumed into pink explosiveness, and then, all summer,
the green-black canopy. Prefer it unbent?
I have no use for you then,
says the torque and fervor of the tree.
Mark Doty’s “Amagansett Cherry” is available in his collection Deep Lane, by W.W. Norton &Co. http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Deep-Lane/
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