Those flowers don’t trick gardeners only

Those flowers don’t trick gardeners only Those flowers don’t trick gardeners only. According to Sumner, bees can’t tell the difference, either. This helps explain why pumpkins and winter squash are promiscuous crossbreeders. Pepos, as both fruit are called, are monoecious: they have “separate male and female flowers on one vine,” she said. Within a broad squash species, “the female flower will accept any incoming male pollen grain” from as far as a bee can roam.

Now I like to believe I know as much as the next guy about the birds and the bees. I’ve fathered two children, after all (assuming the pollen was mine). Yet it seemed improbable that the seeds inside my purebred delicata squash could grow up to become a mongrel field pumpkin, with warts and wattles.

Sumner sympathized. “My late father had some cross-pollination issues for years,” she said. “He was just never willing to understand it or face the facts.” Every summer, she recalled, he would harvest his tastiest and hardiest pepos and sock away the seeds for planting the next spring. Without fail, he’d be annoyed — indignant, even — when the seeds yielded strange fruit.