Browsing through the new seed catalog from Chiltern Seeds, really one of the best seed catalogs in the world and they’ll send seed anywhere, I noticed that they’ve re-introduced one of my favorite plants – the squirting cucumber. So I thought I’d let you read the entry on the plant that I wrote back in 1991 for Garden Flowers from Seed, the book I co-authored with Christopher Lloyd. Here it is.
Most plants are grown in gardens because they're attractive or because they provide food or flavouring. But the squirting cucumber, Ecballium elaterium, is grown because it's rude.
A perennial (zone 8-10) which is normally grown as a half-hardy annual, it can be raised in the same way as a zucchini or cucumber and planted out in late May. It forms rather a sprawling plant with rough, hairy, triangular leaves which make a very attractive, though widely spreading mound.
From summer onwards small, pretty, nodding yellow flowers appear, although they tend to be overshadowed by the leaves. It all seems very innocuous. Then the fruits form and the fun starts. The fruits are not large, a very unprepossessing 2in/5cm, but nevertheless, when ripe, the slightest stroking sends a wet mush of seeds and jelly squirting out. 45ft/14m seems to be the record distance. Teenage girls and small boys seem to find it most amusing, but I've also seen straitlaced women of mature years rendered helpless with laughter and embarrassment at the sight of the plant performing in public by a Greek footpath.
You will see this plant growing by the roadside and in waste places from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. In the garden, plant it at the front of a sunny border in well-drained soil or let it trail over a low wall. And although it belongs to the cucumber family, don't be tempted to put the fruits in your mouth; the juice is a powerful purgative, so be warned.
My friend Frank, a chess and cricket authority of the first order, on hearing this name, rummaged in the remnants of his classical education and came up with this astonishing revelation. The name Ecballium is derived from the Greek meaning to fling out, while elaterium is derived from the Latin meaning... to fling out. Well, the seeds do fly a long way.
You can order seed of the squirting cucumber, Ecballium elaterium, from Chiltern Seeds.
Garden Flowers from Seed is long out of print and not easy to find, but is usually available on amazon.
Hah! That's hilarious! I'll bear it in mind for when I've got some space - it sounds like it would reduce my ever-so-mature gang of friends to snorting giggles...
Posted by: The Sproutling | February 03, 2012 at 12:48 PM
How peculiar and fun...I am looking at this plant and wondering if a mystery vine I have in my garden will become one of these...we will see!
Posted by: Lilith | February 04, 2012 at 08:38 AM
Yes, it's a great plant. It would be good ground cover in a sunny dryish place even if it never did anything but produce the leaves and the flowers. But it does!!
Posted by: Graham Rice | February 05, 2012 at 02:55 PM
Very cool. Would this be considered an heirloom or is it a hybrid?
Posted by: Phil (Smiling Gardener) | February 06, 2012 at 03:35 PM
Phil, this is a wild Mediterranean species - entirely un-messed-around-with by plant breeders in any way.
Posted by: Graham Rice | February 11, 2012 at 06:29 PM