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Health & Fitness

The Cityfarm Plant Profiles: Wild Cucumber

Ever wonder about those vines that grow those spiky green balls on our hills? This week in the Cityfarm plant profiles, we take a closer look at this native plant.

In February and March, blooms are everywhere. Our fruit trees alone provide such beauty, overloading our senses with their fragrances and blossoms. Anyone who has witnessed the delicate snowing of pear flower petals in February or has passed an orange tree blooming fragrantly in March can attest to this. 

Around here, however, two blooming vines, Wild Cucumber and Pink Jasmine, steal the show. These vines are about as different as can be, yet together they wind their way upwards to dominate the late winter landscape in NELA.

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Wild Cucumber, Cucamonga manroot (Marah macrocarpus)

We have not even reached the Spring Equinox and the wild grasses on our hills are already turning the color of ripened wheat. Yet, the wild cucumber grows and fruits, as green now as it was when it first appeared in December. This native, tuberous, perennial vine of the squash family stays green well after most of our wild annuals have dried up. How is this possible?

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The wild cucumber gets its staying power from its huge tuberous root that serves as both it's energy and water reserve. Anyone who has dug one up can vouch for the accuracy of its other common name- the manroot. Wild cucumber tubers will send winter shoots out in the same spot for years withstanding drought, grazing and even fire for decades--even centuries.

In fact, the wild cucumber has been growing on our dry chaparral hillsides for thousands of years. The Tongva people called it Takape So'ot, green stars, after the bright-green, spiky fruit. They utilized many parts of the plant. The tuberous root, too bitter and toxic to eat, was crushed to extract saponin. The saponin was used as a soapy lather while the crushed tuber was dropped in ponds to stun fish. The tender leaves, though bitter, were cooked and eaten with meat or acorn gruel. The seeds were decorated and employed by children as marbles or beads, while the adults roasted and ground the seeds into a paste for use as medicines, a fixative for natural pigments or as an oily black or red pigment itself.

The fruit, once dried, could be soaked in water to remove its spikes and used as a loofah. Out of all the uses for the wild cucumber, perhaps it was the young, flowering vines that were the most important to the Tongva, as they represented femininity and the coming of spring.These were collected and woven into head-wreaths that were worn by Tongva women in the spring and used as symbolic necklaces during the spring equinox puberty rituals for Tongva girls.

It's funny that my daughter and her friends, growing up on these same hills, refer to wild cucumber fruits as puff balls. My daughter knows their true name, I have taught her all I know about this native vine, yet she is content to play with the puff balls of her imagination rather than the native plant steeped in history. Maybe is is natural that, as children, we are ultra-curious about the world, just not too interested in the back story. We are content to view things at face value. I can remember being a child, hiking the hills and always feeling like I was the first one discovering these plants, stones, insects and birds. I imagined that the wild cucumber was some rare species of land-dwelling puffer fish. Never did I yearn to put it in its right context as subconsciously, maybe even selfishly, I felt that to do so would diminish my world and my role as explorer.

As an adult I have sought to learn the history of many of these things we come across in our little corner of Los Angeles.  Rather than diminish it, I have found that historical context only deepens my connection to this place, that knowledge only makes my love for it stronger. 

Now when I look at a wild cucumber vine weaving its flowering tendrils through the bare canopy of a dormant black walnut, I know why the vine comes back every season after the rains and why it grows so quickly. I also know that there were Tongva women who wore these same vines in their hair on these same hills, year after year. Now when I look upon a dormant walnut tree, crowned in green starred flowers, I see a Tongva maiden, like a Greek Dryad, sleeping, patiently waiting to awaken on our ancient hills.

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