Читать книгу Cucurbits - James R. Myers - Страница 9

‘Cucurbits’ is a term coined by Liberty Hyde Bailey for cultivated species of the family Cucurbitaceae. Beginning in the early 20th century, the term has been used not only for cultivated forms, but also for any species of the Cucurbitaceae, and it will be so used in this book.

Other vernaculars applied to the family and various of its members are ‘gourd’, ‘melon’, ‘cucumber’, ‘squash’ and ‘pumpkin’. Of these, squash and pumpkin are the most straightforward, almost always referring to species of Cucurbita. An exception is the fluted pumpkin, which is Telfairia occidentalis. The unqualified terms melon and cucumber usually define Cucumis melo and Cucumis sativus, respectively. However, confusion develops when modifiers are added to these terms. Whereas muskmelon or sprite melon refers to a specific type of C. melo, watermelon is Citrullus lanatus, wintermelon is Benincasa hispida and bitter melon is Momordica charantia. Gourd generally is used to describe a cucurbit fruit with a hard, durable rind; usually it refers to bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria), or a wild species of Cucurbita, or an ornamental form of Cucurbita pepo. However, various other cucurbits also are called gourds, such as luffa sponge gourd (Luffa aegyptiaca), ridge gourd (Luffa acutangula) and some that do not have hard rinds, such as bitter gourd or bitter melon (M. charantia) and ivy gourd (Coccinia grandis). Sometimes the term refers to tough-rinded species of other plant families, such as the tree gourd (Crescentia cujete L., Bignoniaceae).

Complicating matters further, more than one common name is often applied to a single species. For example, names for B. hispida include ash gourd, white pumpkin, wax gourd and winter melon. Sometimes different names refer to distinct crops within a species, such as pumpkin, zucchini and acorn squash in Cucurbita pepo. In other cases, the different common names for the same species are used interchangeably. Frequently used common names for cucurbit crops are given in the Appendix.

Popular terms for the cucurbits may be confused in other languages as well. Cucumber and melon are sometimes considered the same in India. Older terminology in Chinese included ‘guo-kua’, which is translated into English as ‘melon’, but it includes watermelon (C. lanatus) as well as melon (C. melo). Also, ‘tsaikua’, which usually translates as ‘gourd’, refers to B. hispida, C. sativus, M. charantia and species of Cucurbita and Luffa. This is no longer a problem in China, since the names in Mandarin are now precise.