Week 35: Cucumis, Robert Hass, Marcus Aurelius (and William Cowper, too)

Fig. 1. Fede Galizia. Still Life with Apples, Pears, Cucumbers, Figs, Plums, and a Melon (c. 1625-1630).#

Waning Gibbous Moon — 11 Days to New; 23 Days to Fall Equinox

Headnote#

Which is messier, the history of words or of plants?

Something like "squash" is exactly what it claims to be. The English word was adopted from the Narragansett word, askutasquash ("the things that may be eaten raw"), from askut, "green, raw, uncooked," plus asquash, "eaten." Compare that to “kabocha,” the sweet-fleshed winter squash beloved across Japan, which derives its name from a compression of the Portuguese Camboja abóbora, "Cambodia pumpkin.” It was assigned this name merely because Cambodia happened to be the last port Portuguese sailors called at before reaching Japan. This particular squash is not Cambodian, or even really Asian, since every member of the genus Cucurbita, including kabocha, traces its origins to the Americas.

Cucumber's confusion works in a different way. While Kabocha's name wandered from the truth, cucumber's name never moved at all—but the plant beneath it did. This is the namesake of the genus Cucumis, home to both true cucumbers and many sweet melons since Linnaeus devised his system of botanical classification in 1735. When the Roman historian Pliny described the “cucumis” grown for Emperor Tiberius, who demanded a daily serving of the crisp, refreshing fruit (did I mention that cucumbers and melons are, botanically, berries?); and when the Mishnah described the downy “qishu’im” eaten in second-century Judea, later translators rendered both terms as “cucumber.” But true cucumber (Cucumis sativus) is smooth and warty, not downy. The hairy, twisted, serpentine fruits these ancient writers describe in fact match the ancient Egyptian snake, or chate, melons (varieties of Cucumis melo—not yet the sweet melons we know today, which wouldn't emerge in Central Asia for another several centuries). These crisp, high-water-content melons arrived in Europe centuries before the cucumber. Only gradually did true cucumbers replace these melons in European art, writing, and mouths,* as they journeyed from the foothills of the Himalayas across the Indo-Mediterranean world through two routes: overland through Persia into northern/Eastern Europe and, later, across the Mediterranean via Islamic trade and agriculture. Thus, the long history of the word “cucumber,” which possibly stretches back to ancient Sumer, was extended a little further.

When this wanderwort, or “wandering word,” eventually arrived in the English language, “cucumber” replaced the Germanic eorþæppla (literally, “earth-apples”) but spent several centuries being pronounced as “cowcumbers”—perhaps, according to one folk legend, because they were primarily considered a bovine treat. Once the word was introduced to the Americas, however, its range again expanded to include not only true cucumbers (rumored to have been brought there by Christopher Columbus) but many other cucumber-like fruits, including those from Africa (Cucumis anguria, aka the maroon cucumber or West Indian gherkin), Europe (the aforementioned Cucumis melo var. flexuosus, or snake melon), and the Americas themselves (Echinocystis lobata, or wild cucumber; and Marah macrocarpus, or Cucamonga manroot).

Cucumber’s taxonomical bedfellow, “melon,” seems to sidestep this messy history. The word comes from Latin melo, shortened from melopepo, which was borrowed from the Greek mēlopepōn ("apple-gourd"). Like “squash,” “melon” named what it saw and left it at that: no mistranslated ancestor, no wrong continent. Linnaeus's decision to lodge melon inside the same genus as cucumber was based on their substantial similarities: their vining morphologies, monoecious flowers, and pepo-like fruits (a hard rind surrounding a fleshy, many-seeded interior). Yet his decision had repercussions appropriate to the messy Cucurbits family. In 1988, a group of researchers proposed splitting the genus so that cucumbers kept their longstanding name, while melon and its relatives would be exiled to a new genus called Melo. The proposal never took, and when genetic sequencing finally arrived to settle the matter, it didn't divide the family; it further enlarged it, absorbing five more genera just to maintain the category’s phylogenic coherence. In the process, the genus's assumed geography was extended, too, as Cucumis turned out to have an entire overlooked branch stretching through the Malay Archipelago and into Australia.

The names reach, split, and tangle like the vines themselves. Yet their humble refreshment—musky sweet, or vegetal and slightly bitter—persists.

* The slow change was reflected in Medieval herbal manuscripts (circa 1300-1458), in which illustrations of snake and chate melon are gradually crowded out by pictures of cucumber.

Fig. 2. Depiction labelled Qawoun (melon, Cucumis melo). From Kitab al-Hasha'ish fi Hayula al-‘Ilaj al-Tibbi (Arabic translation of Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica, edited by Abu ‘Abdallah al-Natili, approx. 990) and copied in Samarqand, 1082. Rpt. Harry S. Paris, et al. “Medieval emergence of sweet melons, Cucumis melo (Cucurbitaceae).” Annals of Botany 110.1 (May 2012): 23-33.

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Readings#

1. In the old torment of the earth
   When the fires were cooling and disposing themselves
   Into granite and limestone and serpentine and shale,
   It is possible to imagine that, under yellowish chemical clouds,
   The molten froth, having burned long enough,
   Was already dreaming of release,
   And that the dream, dimly
   But with increasingly distinctness, took the form
   Of water, and that it was then, still more dimly, that it imagined
   The dark green skin and opal green flesh of cucumbers.

Robert Hass. From “Poem with a Cucumber in It.” The American Poetry Review 36.5 (September/October 2007): 34.#

2. A cucumber is bitter.⁠—Throw it away.⁠—There are briars in the road.⁠—Turn aside from them.⁠—This is enough. Do not add, And why were such things made in the world? For thou wilt be ridiculed by a man who is acquainted with nature, as thou wouldst be ridiculed by a carpenter and shoemaker if thou didst find fault because thou seest in their workshop shavings and cuttings from the things which they make. And yet they have places into which they can throw these shavings and cuttings, and the universal nature has no external space; but the wondrous part of her art is that though she has circumscribed herself, everything within her which appears to decay and to grow old and to be useless she changes into herself, and again makes other new things from these very same, so that she requires neither substance from without nor wants a place into which she may cast that which decays. She is content then with her own space, and her own matter and her own art.

Marcus Aurelius. Meditations, Book VIII, Section 50. Circa 175 CE. The Thoughts of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Trans. George Long. Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown, and Company, 1899. 209.#

3. To raise the prickly and green-coated gourd,
   So grateful to the palate, and when rare
   So coveted, else base and disesteem'd —
   Food for the vulgar merely — is an art
   That toiling ages have but just matur'd,
   And at this moment unassay'd in song.
   Yet gnats have had, and frogs and mice, long since,
   Their eulogy; those sang the Mantuan bard,
   And these the Grecian, in ennobling strains;
   And in thy numbers, Phillips, shines for aye
   The solitary shilling. Pardon then,
   Ye sage dispensers of poetic fame,
   Th' ambition of one, meaner far, whose pow'rs,
   Presuming an attempt not less sublime,
   Pant for the praise of dressing to the taste
   Of critic appetite, no sordid fare,
   A cucumber, while costly yet and scarce.

William Cowper. From “The Task, Book III: The Garden. 1785. The Poetical Wrks of William Cowper. Ed. William Benham. London: Macmillan and Co., 1870. 446-462.#

Supplementum#

• Andrés Muedano. “Cucumber: The Plant That Moves More than You Think.” JStor Daily (March 25, 2026).

• Monica Bowen. “Crevelli’s Cucumbers, Christ, and Cotán.” Alberti’s Window: An Art History Blog (January 8, 2019).

• Harry S. Paris and Jules Janick. “The Cucumis of Antiquity: A Case of Mistaken Identity.” Cucurbit Genetics Cooperative Report (2010/2011): 1-2.

• Harry S. Paris, Marie-Christine Daunay, and Jules Janick. “Occidental diffusion of cucumber (Cucumis sativus) 500–1300 CE: two routes to Europe.” Annals of Botany 109.1 (January 2012): 117–126.

• Paris, Harry S et al. “Medieval emergence of sweet melons, Cucumis melo (Cucurbitaceae).” Annals of Botany 110.1 (2012): 23-33.

• Susanne S. Renner, et al. “Phylogenetics of Cucumis (Cucurbitaceae): cucumber (C. sativus) belongs in an Asian/Australian clade far from melon (C. melo).” BMC Evolutionary Biology 7.58 (Apr 2007).

Fig. 3. Juan Sánchez Cotán. Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber (c. 1602)

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✦ From the Earthly Book of Hours ✦#

I’m on vacation, kind of, and trying to get away from my computer. But I’m obsessed with the below photograph by Anne Brigman, who I recently learned about. Though it symbolizes so many aspects of liminal, nycthemeral time, I included it in the Doldrums portion of the project, for its poise between tension and serenity.

Fig. 4. Anne W. Brigman. Infinitude (1915).