Ecballium elaterium (Squirting Cucumber)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Ecballium elaterium, photographed by Pete Bradshaw — fig. a Pete Bradshaw, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-08 / obs. 204421482

Ecballium elaterium, photographed by Andre Hosper — fig. b Andre Hosper, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204296529

Ecballium elaterium, photographed by Yamil J.R — fig. d Yamil J.R, CC0 1.0 / obs. 199748809

Ecballium elaterium, photographed by Dimitra Vasileiadou — fig. e Dimitra Vasileiadou, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 199055410

Ecballium elaterium, photographed by Quentin Groom — fig. f Quentin Groom, CC0 1.0 / obs. 198342207

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 29 botanical countries

Native distribution of Ecballium elaterium, 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. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Albania	ALB	EUROPE
Baleares	BAL
Bulgaria	BUL
Corse	COR
France	FRA
Greece	GRC
Italy	ITA
Krym	KRY
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Portugal	POR
Sardegna	SAR
Sicilia	SIC
South European Russia	RUS
Spain	SPA
Türkiye-in-Europe	TUE
Ukraine	UKR
Cyprus	CYP	ASIA-TEMPERATE
East Aegean Is.	EAI
Iran	IRN
Lebanon-Syria	LBS
North Caucasus	NCS
Palestine	PAL
Transcaucasus	TCS
Türkiye	TUR
Algeria	ALG	AFRICA
Canary Is.	CNY
Libya	LBY
Morocco	MOR
Tunisia	TUN

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 1,080 in flower of 1,550 examined

25%

47%

77%

81%

82%

72%

68%

77%

82%

76%

54%

25%

Proportion of examined Ecballium elaterium in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	11	44	25%	15% to 39%
Feb	30	64	47%	35% to 59%
Mar	70	91	77%	67% to 84%
Apr	114	141	81%	74% to 86%
May	150	183	82%	76% to 87%
Jun	103	143	72%	64% to 79%
Jul	109	160	68%	61% to 75%
Aug	114	148	77%	70% to 83%
Sep	149	182	82%	76% to 87%
Oct	138	181	76%	70% to 82%
Nov	72	134	54%	45% to 62%
Dec	20	79	25%	17% to 36%

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Ecballium elaterium 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. 1,080 of 1,550 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 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 1,991 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	0.4 °C	5.3 °C	11.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	24.6 °C	29.2 °C	34.6 °C
Annual rainfall	378 mm	608 mm	1,045 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	3 mm	36 mm	137 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,991 research-grade observations of Ecballium elaterium 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 12 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.

Bryonia elaterium E.H.L.Krause
Cucumis agrestis Rchb.
Ecballium agreste Rchb.
Ecballium officinale T.Nees
Ecballium officinarum Rich. ex M.Roem.
Ecballium purgans Schrad.
Elaterium cordifolium Moench
Momordica aspera Lam.
Momordica ecirrhata Stokes
Momordica elastica Salisb.
Momordica elaterium L.
Momordica officinarum-elaterium Crantz

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.