Last Saturday, when I was making my way home from World Farm to Khatib MRT station, my friend who was with me chanced upon an interesting vine that was growing on the chain-linked fence surrounding the compound of Peiying Primary School. I reckoned this vine had been growing there for some time and I had not been paying attention to it all this while, partly because it looked somewhat weedy.
Little green fruits hanging from every leaf axil along the vine.
The vine had angular, heart-shaped leaves and borne numerous, small, green fruits that hung from every leaf axil along the length of the vine. At the first glance from afar and via the look of its leaves, I thought it was the noxious vine, Mikania micrantha. But I provened wrong because the leaves of Mikania micrantha are much longer in length and the flowers produced by the vine was not white but yellow.
The leaves of the vine are cordate in shape.
After a close-look at its flowers, my friend told me that he was quite sure that the vine is a cucurbit, a member of the melon family. The flowers produced by the plant are very small, five-petalled and yellow in colour. Typical of a monoceious cucurbit, this vine produces male and female flowers on the same plant. The male flowers were borne on a spray while those of the female appeared singly and each had an obvious ovary behind their petals.
Male flowers are borne in a cluster.
I was quite surprised by this discovery as it was something new to me. I have never seen it growing anywhere else before. The other cucurbit vine that I know grows like a weed in Singapore is the ivy gourd, Coccinia grandis. The ivy gourd’s flowers look like stars and are white in colour. Fruits are oval in shape and they turn red when ripe. They are larger in size when compared to the ones produced on this cucurbit vine.
The female flower is produced singly and had a baby fruit located behind the yellow petals.
I wanted to learn more about this plant and before I could really do that, I need to find out what is its botanical name. My initial search for information inside printed publications that I had did not yield anything useful and I went on to dig for some more in the World Wide Web. After much effort and leads, I managed to find some pictures via Google that revealed plants that look very similar to the one I saw. Luckily and thankfully, I chanced upon the web version of a publication entitled ”Guide to Tendrillate Climbers of Costa Rican Mountains” that was written by Alexander Krings and Richard R. Braham. It had a comprehensive description of morphological characteristics of some plants that I found tremendously useful.
After much reading, I reasoned the likely identity of this cucurbit vine to be Melothria pendula. It is commonly known as the creeping cucumber or Guadeloupe cucumber. It has a close relative, M. scabra but the two can be told apart via the smaller fruits produced by M. pedula that measure up to 1.5 cm long and 1 cm in diameter and are uniformly green. Melothria scabra fruits are larger up to 4 cm long and 2.5 cm wide and are frequently striped which look like mini-watermelons.
A closer look at the fruits.
When ripe, the fruits are said to turn black externally and small, white seeds similar to those seen in cucumbers can be seen being lodged within an insipid, cooling pulp. The fruits are edible when they are ripe and pickled when they are still green. There is unverified information on the World Wide Web stating the fruits are strong laxatives!
This cucurbit is native to the West Indies, Southern United States to Argentina and seeds can be bought from some online seed sources. I am now wondering whether this vine was deliberately planted by someone who had the seeds or is it a plant that has long naturalised in Singapore.
