h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Willem, your entry is a gem in so many way

First, you can always win me over with pictures of violets. (The Labrador vuioletsi n my back yard are full
opf leaves but not in bloom yet). Dmitri has also won me over with that picture of the dandelion. Bees need
dandeliions, because sometimes there's no nectar available form anything else. Likewise clover.

" I loved the magical, mystical mist forest, its tall trees, its soft shade, and all the ferns and mosses and other
wonderful growing things all over the place"

I get a mystical feeling about forest clearings where ladyslippers bloom next to White Pine trees. My father
was always finding Juniper or Spruce seedlings, and transplanting them to syuitable places on the family's
three-acre yard. The people who own that land now have removed many of the trees, and it hurts to see that!

"epiphytes such as Streptocarpus, the Clivia bush lilies, and the amazing and primitive-looking cycads, which
covered an inaccessible valley (we only could look at them from across a deep ravine) in their thousands."

Streptocarpus sounds like a disease. Inaccessible places are the safest places for wild plants to grow.

"those seed companies were not just selling tree seeds, but seeds of any and all interesting plants that they were able to collect."

I get emails and catalogs from too many seed companies.

Your picture of "Cucurbit" is intriguing. Does it form squash or cucumbers?

Hello Paulh, and I'm very happy you liked this!

Yeah I know what you mean when you say it hurts, over here they keep 'developing' more and more wild land close to where I live, and I know the plants they destroyed in the process …

OK, well South Africa has a rich flora of cucurbits, which is the pumpkin, cucumber, gourd and squash family, but most wild kinds have much smaller fruits than the ones we humans use. In domesticating them they've been bred to have bigger, sweeter or whatever fruit. We have here the wild ancestors of watermelons, called Tsamma melons. Those are about the biggest of our wild cucurbits with melons about 4-5" in diameter. Anyways the one in the photo wasn't carrying any fruits, so I don't know which species it was … without fruit they mostly look much alike.

The Chinese eat Bitter melon. I've never tasted it, but it sounds intriguing.

No, wait, I think it's in one of the dishes at an Indian restaurant I like -- which would only sell food as takeout.

Over here we have some species that have edible and not-edible variants. The edible ones vary between bitter and sweet … but the more bitter, the more poisonous. They can sometimes be rendered harmless by cooking.

I haven't eaten many of our local cucurbits, but I can mention three … the one is a species of Corallocarpus I'm growing which have very small but sweet fruit; the other is Momordica balsamina, with larger fruit that 'explode' when ripe and when touched, with the seeds covered in a thin sweet red aril; the last one is Cucumis metuliferus, which is one with edible and non-edible variants, the edible kinds are rather large and sweet.

They look like this:

http://pza.sanbi.org/cucumis-metuliferus

Wow, their fruit looks like a weapon! It must have taken a very brave or very hungry person to eat these.

A variety marketed as 'New Zealand Cucumber is marketed in the local s. CA supermarkets.

It needs to be peeled, but has a mild lime-like flavor.

I have a couple coming up as 'volunteers' in my garden even now.

That looks like a turtle, Willem.

It looks a bit like a hand grenade … you can throw it at people but it won't explode, but the spiky bits could cause some damage.

The way I eat it is to just cut it open and scoop out the flesh and eat it seeds and all.

I bet that's tasty.