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BUT WHAT
ABOUT THE
WATERMELON?
CHRIS DENNETT
he earthy sweet aroma and bright red flesh… The juice drip-
ping down your chin at a backyard barbeque… The wide slices
Tadored by children nationwide… Until the 1990s, the small
black missiles spit out, and being warned that if you swallowed them a
plant would grow in your stomach… The Watermelon.
It’s hard to imagine anything more ubiquitous when it comes to sum-
mer than the watermelon. Who doesn’t have a memory of eating
watermelon that doesn’t include friends, family, hot weather, and fun?
I would support it on a ballot for “National Fruit.” I suspect many oth-
ers would as well. But the watermelon has an interesting past that, like
most melons, doesn’t start on this continent. And in fact doesn’t really
start with anything that today we would recognize as a watermelon.
Like virtually all domesticated plants, the watermelon began its inter-
action with humans in a very different form. Scientists disagree about
the original indigenous ancestor, but the best evidence seems to indi-
cate a melon called “gurum” in Sudan, and “gurma” in Egypt that was
first cultivated around 5,000 years ago. Archaeologists have found
summer 2018 | www.southernoregonmagazine.com 111
