I knew this was going to happen. I have to face the ultimate dilemma: choose between the carriage (with the princess in it) or the pumpkin. Now, wait before you make a blind suggestion. You don’t know yet about that one addiction of mine that makes the decision so difficult. You see, I am obsessed with pumpkins. Not just the Jack O’Lantern at Halloween, but all of the ones that make up the genre Cucurbita. They are everything a lonely kitchen gardener like me could want. They are sensuous, have a gentle touch and shine with singular personalities. True, they are demanding and take an awful lot of space, but that is expected from any richly coloured company, isn’t it?
My infatuation began quite casually with a visit to friends who cultivate the land for a living. They have for dwelling a beautiful colonial house clad with bleached cedar shingles and a white veranda of noble proportions. There doesn’t appear to be any design about the garden surrounding it, and yet it looks marvelous with tall ash trees affording shade to Solomon’s seals, self-sown impatiens balfourii, martagon lilies, lady’s mantle and the misunderstood Apios Americana which, for once, is left to climb and clamber on the aforementioned veranda’s balustrade. It is through the veil of this vine that I saw the first collection of pumpkins that sparked my interest in them. You might not be familiar with the Apios, and it is therefore necessary that should I make a brief description of it so that you can picture the portrait as I saw it myself on that day. It is a very pretty vine, similar in leaf to a wisteria, with clusters of ‘Etruscan Red’ pea flowers in late summer. It is herbaceous and grows back from spreading underground rhizomes every year. It is too boisterous for the manicured border but otherwise a worthy garden plant if kept under control. This is made easy in the fact that the round rhizomes are attached together like a string of pearls (hence its quirky name of ‘patate en chapelet’ or rosary potato in French parts of Canada where it grows wild and where it used to be eaten in meager times).
Back at our picture then; here we were, on a hot autumn day. I had just walked through my friend’s exhaustive gardens and was still intoxicated by the beauty of the marsh mallows and seedy red orach when I came to the front of the house and was hit by the beauty of the scene. There stood two dozens, or three perhaps, of the loveliest deep orange fruits in an old decrepit willow basket, clothed with the flowers of the Apios. ‘They are ‘Ushiki Kuri’ those’ said my friend when he caught the sight of me transfixed. ‘Rather a good season for the squashes, we’ve got other sorts curing in the attic. I tried ‘Melonette Jaspée de Vendée’ and ‘Galeuse d’Eysines’ this year’.
The Melonette turned out to be a sweet round buff-coloured (jaspée; after the crystalline stone jasper) fruit with sweet, nutty flesh and the other a squat, flesh-coloured pumpkin covered in corky warts (‘Galeuse’; warty) that looks more like a sculpture than a vegetable. Quite wonderful!
I had already grown the ubiquitous orange belly pumpkin as a teenager, the ancient ‘Connecticut Field’ variety I still love so much, although I now grow a similar but less rampant sort called ‘Appalachian’. It was so easy, all one had to do was to put the wheel barrow behind the horse, feed it a little hay, let time take its course, collect the barrow, drop it’s content in a pile in the vegetable garden, and throw a couple of seeds in the centre. No need to water, the manure being quite damp enough, no need to worry about cold nights that still pervaded the air this early in the season, the manure supplying the necessary heat for germination. I was always rewarded with healthy plants that grew, grew and kept growing. I always planted them too closely, I still do; it is almost impossible to believe that something can grow so quickly as to cover an entire neighbourhood in one season! In the early autumn, once the foliage had been killed by the frost appeared the big fruits. Well, they appeared to other people, I already knew exactly where each fruit was, having inspected under the vines through the summer, an operation that I had to do in long trousers, since the leaves and stalks of cucurbits are distastefully coarse and prickly. I had also grown the spaghetti squash to please an old lady friend who had introduced it and extolled its virtues to me, a strange oddity for which I still keep a particular affection. If cut in half and steamed head down, it yields deliciously crunchy fibers similar to spaghetti that can be eaten in the same way, with a thin tomato sauce and lots of garlic. I had also grown (rather too successfully to my mother’s liking) a few small ornamental gourds from a penny packet but it had never occurred to me that there should be so many other types like the luscious greys from Australia and New Zealand, the delicious American Hubbards, the pretty but bland French giraumons, or best of all, the Japanese Kuri or Chestnuts. Each region of the world seems to have its own distinct variety and my seed collection increases as I manage to source new ones every year, yet space does not multiply itself and it has now become an ordeal to choose which ones to plant in the spring.
I think I have just answered the question that plagued me at the beginning of this essay; forget Cinderella and her glittery carriage, I much prefer a pumpkin after midnight anytime!