A mysterious item turned up on my desk the other day — a clear plastic bag containing leaves, vine and two small fruits. With it was a note: “Do you know or can you find out what it is?”
Attached was the name Felicia Taylor of Felicia’s Place beauty salon in McComb.
It didn’t look like much of a mystery at first. I glanced at the large, single-lobed, rounded leaves; the hairy, tendril-like vines; and the oval, golfball-sized, striped fruits — one green, one yellow — and immediately pegged it as a maypop.
I’ve run across maypops many times while tromping autumn fields. The vine runs along the ground, and the fruits are tasty if you pop them open and eat the inside. They’re kin to the tropical passion fruit and have a bright purplish flower.
But a glance at the Internet quickly showed this wasn’t a maypop. Maypop fruit is green with no stripes, and the leaves have three sharply pointed lobes.
So I took a photo of the mystery plant and emailed it to a botanist at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science and to Pike County Master Gardener Virginia Goza, who said she would send it to her contacts.
Creeping cucumber?
Meanwhile I returned to the Internet for some research of my own and came up with another candidate: creeping cucumber.
But no, it had fruit the size of olives that turn black when ripe. And the leaves were different.
I sliced open the yellow fruit. It looked like a cucumber inside, with lots of little seeds. When I licked it, it tasted like a sour cucumber.
Native gourd?
One of Goza’s gardening friends suggested native gourd, also known as Buffalo gourd, wild pumpkin and stinking gourd. The scientific name is Cucurbita foetidissima.
The fruit looks very similar, sure enough, but the leaves are sharp like arrowheads, and the native gourd isn’t typically found this far east.
Smell melon?
Getting no immediate response from the museum botanist, I emailed the photo to the Pike County Extension Service, where it circulated among a number of experts. Their consensus was smell melon, also known as Dudaim melon.
According to Extension Service emails: “Dudaim melon — looks like miniature watermelon; size of ping pong ball, turns bright orange at maturity, may have green stripes if not quite mature; seeds look like small cucumber seeds; Cucumis melo var. dudaim; wild in the southeast, especially Louisiana, including Texas and Arizona; It can be utilized for food, but is commercially classified as non-edible. ...
“They are pretty common in south Mississippi out in the woods and climbing on fences, trees, etc. People just don’t run into them that often.”
But there was one problem. The smell melon gets its name because the fruit has a strong odor when ripe. This fruit had no smell at all.
Moonflower?
I decided to ride out and look at the actual plant. After all, I hadn’t even seen the flowers. I drove over to Mrs. Taylor’s beauty salon at 802 Howe St. She was busy with a customer but stepped outside to show me the mystery plant.
It had grown up uninvited among her moonflower vines. The flowers were small and yellow.
Could this actually be part of her moonflower vines somehow? They looked similar.
But no, the moonflower has smooth Valentine-shaped leaves and large white flowers that bloom at night. A different plant entirely.
Gulf coast melon?
I emailed the photo to Dr. Mac Alford, formerly of Liberty and now a botanist at the University of Southern Mississippi.
“I get a lot of questions about this thing!” he replied. “It’s Cucumis melo var texanus, or ‘gulf coast melon.’ ... In short, it’s a cucumber/canteloupe relative that has watermelon-like fruits and is one of those cool taxonomic questions that needs further study.”
He even attached a “molecular paper” in case I wanted to learn more.
About the same time I got this from the Museum of Natural Science botanist:
“It is Cucumis melo Linnaeus var. texanus Naudin, Gulf Coast Melon. It is found in fields, along roadsides, and other disturbed areas. It occurs from the Panhandle of Florida west through Mississippi, Texas and Mexico. ... likely introduced from Asia in pre-Columbian times. The fruit looks like a watermelon on the exterior when the fruit is immature, but will turn bright yellow when the fruit has ripened. It is edible, tasting somewhat like a cucumber.”
So the botanists agreed: Gulf Coast melon.
Mystery solved?
This put me in something of a quandary: The botanists said Gulf Coast melon, while the Extension Service experts said smell melon.
I mentioned that to Alford, who replied: “The ‘smell melon’ is actually part of the same so-called species, Cucumis melo, along with canteloupe and muskmelon. It’s var. dudaim instead of var. texanus. There are at least five described varieties of this ‘thing,’ and several have been (intermixed) by hybridization/selection/cultivation, so you can guess that there’s quite a mess of what is what! ... In short, I think that we came to the same answer, but we gave it different names.”
