VII: Cucumber
A close-up look at the weird cowcumber magnolia.
Good morning. Today is septidi, the 7th of Messidor, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate le concombre, a summer gourd that loves to be pickled.
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Cucumbers, like tomatoes, are typically considered to be vegetables even though botanically they are fruits. Well, let's get more specific than that. Cucumbers are an elongated gourd berry, and like all gourds, they grow to the size that the plant's available water supply will allow. A ripe cucumber is about 95% water. The phrase "cool as a cucumber" is not just an alliterative idiom that rose to power with the slang "cool" in the mid-20th century – it's been around in a more literal sense since the 17th century, and refers to how the watery insides of a cucumber are always a good deal colder than the surrounding summer heat – about 20% colder, science confirmed.
Some cucumbers grow on trees. Not the green ones you find at the grocery store, of course. Those grow on vines – some species don't even need more than a dime of dirt to grow from – and the ones that do grow on trees aren't proper cucumbers at all, but cowcumbers. You can find them on a very specific, ancient, weird magnolia.
