Cucurbita pepo (field pumpkin)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Cucurbita pepo, photographed by GERMAN LEONEL SARMIENTO CRUZ — fig. a GERMAN LEONEL SARMIENTO CRUZ, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-05-02 / obs. 125386378

Cucurbita pepo, photographed by Вячеслав Юсупов — fig. c Вячеслав Юсупов, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 98764423

Cucurbita pepo, photographed by Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata — fig. d Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 95285663

Cucurbita pepo, photographed by Michael Andresek — fig. e Michael Andresek, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 170192044

Cucurbita pepo, photographed by Robert H. Wardell — fig. f Robert H. Wardell, CC0 1.0 / obs. 92872665

Cucurbita pepo, photographed by David Ashcroft — fig. g David Ashcroft, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 83545178

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 6 botanical countries

Native distribution of Cucurbita pepo, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Mexico Central	MXC	NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Gulf	MXG
Mexico Northeast	MXE
Mexico Northwest	MXN
Mexico Southeast	MXT
Mexico Southwest	MXS

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 90 in flower of 151 examined

80%

73%

55%

66%

51%

20%

Proportion of examined Cucurbita pepo in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	4	5	80%	38% to 96%
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	0	2	too few examined
Apr	3	4	too few examined
May	2	3	too few examined
Jun	4	5	80%	38% to 96%
Jul	11	15	73%	48% to 89%
Aug	16	29	55%	38% to 72%
Sep	29	44	66%	51% to 78%
Oct	18	35	51%	36% to 67%
Nov	2	4	too few examined
Dec	1	5	20%	4% to 62%

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Cucurbita pepo observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 90 of 151 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 5 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 1,996 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-11.6 °C	-1.6 °C	14.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	20.3 °C	28.1 °C	34.5 °C
Annual rainfall	490 mm	1,015 mm	1,539 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	24 mm	169 mm	290 mm

It is found where winters bring hard frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,996 research-grade observations of Cucurbita pepo that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 50 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Citrullus variegatus Schrad. ex M.Roem.
Cucumis pepo (L.) Dumort.
Cucumis zapallo Steud.
Cucurbita aurantia Willd.
Cucurbita ceratoceras Haberle ex Mart.
Cucurbita clodiensis Nocca
Cucurbita courgero Ser.
Cucurbita elongata Bean ex Schrad.
Cucurbita esculenta Gray
Cucurbita fastuosa Salisb.
Cucurbita hybrida Bertol. ex Naudin
Cucurbita lignosa Mill.
Cucurbita mammeata Molina
Cucurbita mammosa J.F.Gmel.
Cucurbita marsupiiformis Haberle ex M.Roem.
Cucurbita oblonga Link
Cucurbita pepo subsp. gumala Teppner
Cucurbita pepo subsp. pepo
Cucurbita pepo subvar. nigra Harz
Cucurbita pepo var. akoda Makino
Cucurbita pepo var. americana Zhit.
Cucurbita pepo var. bicolor Harz
Cucurbita pepo var. condensa L.H.Bailey
Cucurbita pepo var. elongata Harz

and 26 more.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.