The pumpkin has no scientific definition, only a very long history
Botanists cannot tell you exactly what a pumpkin is. The word covers round orange squashes from several different Cucurbita species, yet it has no formal meaning. What is certain is its age: pumpkin fragments from Mexico show people were growing them thousands of years before anyone farmed wheat in Britain.
Cucurbita pepo ranks among the oldest domesticated plants known, with remains in Mexico dated to between 7000 and 5500 BCE. Wild squashes are native to what is now northeastern Mexico and the southern United States. Many Indigenous North American societies grew squash alongside maize and beans in the Three Sisters system of companion planting, though today's heavyweight cultivars are left out because they can crush their neighbours. Within decades of European colonisation, pictures resembling the modern Connecticut Field pumpkin were already appearing in Europe.
The name has two competing origin stories. The Oxford English Dictionary traces it to pompion, an older word for edible gourds that came through French and Latin from the Greek pepon. A rival theory points to the Massachusett word pôhpukun, meaning grows forth round, perhaps used by the Wampanoag when they showed the crop to the Plymouth colonists. Squash, at least, clearly comes from a Massachusett word.
Botanically the fruit is a kind of berry called a pepo. Ordinary C. pepo pumpkins weigh 3 to 8 kilograms, but giant varieties, mostly C. maxima bred by enthusiasts and growing societies, can top a tonne; the record set in October 2023 was 1,246.9 kilograms. Plants carry separate male and female flowers and depend on bees, and a poorly pollinated fruit usually starts to swell and then stalls. The native squash bee, which evolved alongside the crop, has declined, possibly partly due to sensitivity to the pesticide imidacloprid.
World production of pumpkins, squash and gourds reached 34.6 million tonnes in 2024, with India growing 27 percent and China 22 percent. In the United States, Illinois leads a list of top states, and Texas has named the pumpkin its state squash.
Source: Pumpkin
