Tag Archives: ecology

Gather and Sow: October 2026

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The Gather and Sow: October 2026 newsletter is out.

Pumpkins and other winter squashes are gloriously large fruits and are therefore excellent subjects for easy botanical observation. Carving a Jack-O-Lantern or cutting up a squash for a recipe becomes an instructive dissection when you know what to look for. We walk through the necessary information in this month’s Botany Lab of the Month. Before that we provide a brief overview of squash diversity in Food for Thought. We conclude with recent relevant media and journal articles in Gleanings and Baker’s Dozen. But, first, this cartoon from Errant Science that ties some of our summer newsletter topics to this one: 

Strictly botanically speaking, a “berry” is just a fleshy fruit that arises from a flower with a single ovary. The cartoon hilariously illustrates that the colloquial use of “berry” sometimes clashes discordantly with the botanical definition. In casual speech, a berry is a smallish, juicy thing, regardless of how many ovaries the flower in question might have (raspberry and blackberry flowers have numerous ovaries, as we discussed in July’s newsletter), or whether a flower’s ovary was involved at all (the delicious part of a strawberry arises from the flower’s receptacle, not ovary, as we showed in June’s newsletter). Several fruits comfortably fit both definitions, such as blueberries (Vaccinium) and grapes (Vitis). Some botanical berries, though, like tomatoes and eggplants (Solanum), aren’t thought of as smallish and sweet. Squashes, cucumbers, and melons (and loofah!)–the cucurbits (family Cucurbitaceae)–are all pepos, a special type of berry. They develop from flowers with a single inferior ovary, surrounded by a protective hypanthium. The hypanthium fuses to the ovary wall to make the hard rind that surrounds the mature fruit (more on this below in Botany Lab of the Month). We showed in last month’s newsletter that apple flowers also have inferior ovaries. The apple hypanthium develops into delicious tissue instead of a hard rind, making apples pomes, not pepos. 

The irrational nature of pie

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What is a nut, and why is the answer so convoluted? For Thanksgiving, Katherine explores pecans and the very best vegetarian turkey substitute ever: pecan pie.

Traditions
Thanksgiving is all about tradition, and wherever there is tradition, there are entrenched ideas about the right way to do things. Strong opinions can breed discord, judgmental grumbling, or silent rants about how people with so little sense cannot possibly be blood kin or their freely chosen companions. So much for the theory of mind we all developed as toddlers. And so it goes with my feelings about pecan pie.

Pecan pie is properly made according to the recipe on the Karo syrup bottle, preferably by my own father. The recipe does not include bourbon. To be clear, I love bourbon. Bourbon is our only indigenous whiskey. It is made of corn and aged in American oak. I love bourbon, and I respect it enough to drink it neat, from a glass, alongside my pie.

We can all agree that pecan pie should not be rolled in molasses, breaded with crushed pork rinds, and deep fried. Some reasonable people, however, do add chocolate. It might taste just fine that way – even delicious – but it disqualifies the resulting pie from the category under discussion. Sneaking it in under another name doesn’t work either. When the good bourbon-loving people of Kentucky add chocolate to a pecan pie and call it Derby pie, not only are they infringing on a trademark, they are using the wrong kind of nut. Derby-Pie ® is made with walnuts. There is therefore still no excuse for adulterating good pecan pie with chocolate.

What is a pecan?
A pecan half is a rich fat-filled embryonic leaf (a cotyledon) from a pecan tree seed. The flat side of a pecan half bears a pale shield-shaped scar where it was joined to the other cotyledon and where a tiny knobby embryonic root sits waiting for the chance to grow out and start drawing up water. Each pecan half is wrinkled like a brain hemisphere, crammed into its shell. In the natural world, when conditions are right for germination, a pecan seed imbibes water and its cotyledons swell enough to crack open the shell. The cotyledons provide an extremely calorie-dense sack lunch for the seedling to draw upon until it develops leaves and starts photosynthesizing food on its own. Continue reading →