20 cucurbits, Elm Farm, 2017.
Photographed to scale.
Grown by the artist.
Text by Mollie Goldstrom
Pamphlet by Antler Press available here

CUCURBITA MAXIMUS

It likes to hang freely
Platina, 1475

a floral cup in early morning for pollen-gathering solitary bees
entangled in the creeping tendrils of feral escapes extending overground
clasping at supports to hold forth in stamenate, pistillate blossom
five-lobed leaves, palmate, beckoning in an open-handed gesture

first-fruit dominance swelling to tip the scales, (size does matter)
gnaw through verrucose rind to the quick: exocarp, mesocarp, endocarp
anthelmintic flesh of a damp and cold virtue for choleric temperaments
a tumble of hard, spherical, indehiscent fruits cupped by the damp grass

heaped in barrows, perched on picnic tables, sat on sun-warmed gravel
a vegetal sentience propping the door with its ample presence:
tumescence to keep the papers from scattering in the cross-breeze
yellowe to the sun warde, straked with manie spots and lines of divers colours*

rare cultivars lining the mantel in full morphological splendor:
a spinning top with undulations and equatorial edges
longitudinal grooves, bulbous at the apex, a stem end that narrows
globose, oblong, conical, obovoid, discoidal, cylindrical, pyriform

*John Gerard, 1597

Mollie Goldstrom (2018)