Your’s truly sitting on a Cucurbita maxima (Image: Brendan McGarry)
Nothing says autumn like pumpkins. Jack-o-lanterns. Pumpkin pie. Pumpkin spiced lattes. Pumpkin Beer. Fields of pumpkins (and their three sisters cohort, corn, as a maze). Pumpkins are such an integral part of American culture that we don’t really have to think of them, they are just there every fall, taken for granted and left unexamined despite littering porches across Capitol Hill and the country between now and Thanksgiving.
Turns out they are wonders of human/plant mutualism, formed by cultural and ecological change.
These fruits that we broadly call squashes are deeply of the places we call the Americas today. Archeological evidence suggests that people living in present day Mexico and Central America were using pumpkins as a staple crop over 10,000 years ago — so long ago that it feels almost foolish calling them an “American” fruit. Before people started breeding them into their present, and varied, forms, we likely have large herbivores like Mastodons and Mammoths to thank for the widespread range of wild pumpkins that indigenous people came to grow.
Research suggests that the bitter seeds of the wild pumpkins deterred most animal herbivory, except large herbivores that were less sensitive and ate them whole, dispersing the seeds mixed in a pile of soon to be compost. An enjoyable research paper from 2015, theorizes that when these megafauna disappeared, because of humans, pumpkins found a new way to be successful through human mutualism. Modern wild elephants in Africa today demonstrate the same sort of dispersal with wild squashes that are largely ignored by other animals.
The pumpkins of old bore only superficial resemblance (at least in fruit), to the pumpkins of today. Thousands of years of genetic fiddling by humans have given us the tasty, (nearly) entirely edible fruits. Pumpkins are members of the Cucurbitaceae family, which is a nearly global group of plants with around 1000 species, including other squashes, melons, and cucumbers. All of the plants we call pumpkins are in the new world genus Cucurbita, of which several species have been domesticated. According to Logan Kistler, author of the paper mentioned above paper above and Curator of Archaeobotany and Archaeogenomics at the Smithsonian, Cucurbita species may have been domesticated at least six times, in as many places. Debate still flies about the way these plants are classified and their exact origins, understandable for plants that readily hybridize, transport well, and are genetically complex.
We broadly know the origins of modern pumpkins. From Cucurbita pepo, we have the classic fruit of pumpkin patches and jack-o-lanterns, along with the classic winter squashes, zucchinis, and other summer squashes. Less often called a pumpkin, but of close relation and equal agricultural importance today, is Cucurbita moschata, commonly called crookneck squashes, from which we have many modern crops like Butternut Squash and Calabaza, but most notably the variety that fills nearly pumpkin pie filling you buy on the shelf, the Dickinson pumpkin. And of course there is Cucurbita maxima, which has spawned the monstrously huge pumpkins seen at state fairs and growing competitions, (the largest on record was grown this year, weighing in at 2,856.8 lbs).
All pumpkins are squashes but not all squashes are considered pumpkins. Which are these? (Image: Brendan McGarry)
A good many of us have heard of the three sisters, corn, beans, and squash and their agricultural significance in many indigenous cultures across North America. We wouldn’t have the pumpkins of today without thousands of years of relationship, without people who were stewards of and had a reciprocal relationship with the plants. We also wouldn’t have the specific varieties we regularly see today without things like capitalism and industrial scale agriculture. When you hold a pumpkin in your hands, they have heft to them, and that heft is partly born of the complexity of their existence in our modern day.
The tradition of carving pumpkins is one of those things that has morphed and changed with people and culture. The C. pepo that fill fields and adorn porches plain, or as Jack-o-lanterns (a term that sprung from the old name for marsh gases spontaneously combusting), has a shallow connection to the Gaelic holiday Samhain, the progenitor of Halloween. A tradition of carving and lighting turnips and other large root crops during Samhain was brought to America by immigrants from Ireland and other countries in the British Isles. However, with access to large, readily carvable pumpkins, the turnips were spurned and pumpkins adopted. What was once a way to connect with wayward spirits or ward off the Aos Sí of the Otherworld during a time of thin boundaries between our worlds is now mostly just an extension of late state capitalism a la Spirit Halloween.
There’s a temptation to leave the idea that pumpkins were important indigenous crops in the Americas equally unexamined. While an indisputable fact, it doesn’t invite us to consider the complexity of the peoples and the places that the “Americas” represents. In this part of the world the first people had no pumpkins, in fact no squash, and a very different relationship with tending plants born of climate, ecology, and the resulting cultures they influenced. Many important plants (are and) were certainly tended, but they were wild plants, visited at pivotal times of year but mostly left to their own devices — an entirely different (but no less complex) form of land management.
However, there is a sole member of the Cucurbitaceae family native to Washington, Capitol Hill included. Coastal Manroot, or Marah oregana is a wild cucumber that sprawls over open areas across lowland western Washington. While the plant’s leaves and fruit have traditional uses throughout its range, it is also highly toxic, full of those bitter pest deterrents, cucurbitacins that likely had a role in prehuman pumpkin dispersal by mammoths and mastodons. The name “manroot” comes from the enormous tuber, which can truly become human-sized and weigh two hundred pounds. I’ve not seen Coastal Manroot on the Hill, but there are several iNaturalist records of it and I am sure some of the less manicured corners may host the plant. Few would invite it into their yards because they are extremely vigorous and rapidly cover anything within reach, even Himalayan Blackberry.
If you had any doubt that pumpkins have deep stories, hopefully now you see how wonderfully interesting these commonplace plants are. And even if the botanist in me wants to tell you that their fruits are technically a berry, I can also let you enjoy them for what they are to you. Maybe you just like pumpkin spice (which really isn’t pumpkin flavored at all) or god forbid, pumpkin beer and that’s ok. As long as we attempt to appreciate where these things come from (those spices though, they are not American whatsoever, well except for Allspice). As Mary Oliver said, “attention is the beginning of devotion,” and I couldn’t agree more. I see you, pumpkins.
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