Species Crosses in the Genus Cucurbita

Abstract

Of the ten species comprising the genus Cucurbita only three, C. Pepo L., C. maxima Duchesne, and C. moschata Duchesne are annual, and these are the only species cultivated in the United States. Obscurity has surrounded their origin and this has given rise to much discussion regarding their nativity. Some convincing evidence regarding the North American origin of C. Pepo has been furnished by Small (2I), who on collecting excursions to Lake Okeechobee, Florida, discovered a growing on the southern shores of the lake, which he later found to be very similar to our present cultivated pumpkin. Small states that the foliage, flowers, and seeds of this wild pumpkin are indistinguishable from our economic forms of today, but that the fruit is much smaller, ranging in size from a baseball to that of a croquet ball. color is pale yellow, and sometimes variegated with green markings. From a memoir of Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda, written in Spain about I575, Small quotes a description of what is no doubt the same general region in which his own excursions were made. One of the regions is designated by Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda as Tocola-a-chile, which when translated means Gourd place bringing forth, or Country where gourds are produced. Small (2I) believes that the wild pumpkin which he found near Lake Okeechobee is the same as the gourd mentioned in the old Spanish record of exploration in Florida, and that the Lake Okeechobee region, including the unexplored hammocks of Lake Istokpoga, to which this wild pumpkin is at present restricted, represents the original home of the pumpkin. Small (2I) also observes that the Seminole pumpkin, which pioneer white men found among the Seminole Indians in the region now known as Florida, still grown by the Seminole Indians of today, is a cultivated form of the wild type described above. The stem and flowers are identical with those of our various cultivated pumpkins. fruits are larger than in the wild plantand they vary from spheroidal, often much depressed, through pyriform to those with a short stout neck. It seems quite likely that the pumpkins found among Indian tribes by the early settlers, as well as among some tribes of the present day, have come up through the Seminole pumpkin from the original wild form of the Lake Okeechobee region. This wild pumpkin described by Small (2I) belongs to Cucurbita Pepo and may be considered the prototype of this species.