Healing Gourd

Lore & Background

The calabash (Lagenaria siceraria), a vine grown for its fruit, which belongs to the family Cucurbitaceae and is native to tropical Africa. It can be harvested mature, dried, and used as a kitchen utensil, beverage container, or musical instrument. The fruit has a light green smooth skin and white flesh when fresh. Calabash fruits have a variety of shapes: huge and rounded, small and bottle-shaped, or slim and serpentine, and can grow over a metre long.

The bottle gourd was one of the world's first cultivated plants grown not primarily for food, but for use as containers. It has been proven to have been globally domesticated during the Pre-Columbian era. The English word 'calabash' is loaned from Middle French 'calebasse', which derived from Spanish 'calabaza' meaning gourd or pumpkin. The bottle gourd has been recovered from archaeological contexts in China and Japan dating to c. 8,000–9,000 BP, and in Africa from a 12th Dynasty tomb at Thebes dating to ca. 4,000 BP.

Genetic and archaeological information points toward L. siceraria being independently brought under domestication first in Asia, and more than 4,000 years later, in Africa. Gourds were cultivated in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas for thousands of years before Columbus' arrival to the Americas. In 2014, researchers concluded that North and South American specimens were most closely related to wild African variants and could have drifted over the ocean several or many times, as long as 10,000 years ago.

Did You Know?

• The calabash (Lagenaria siceraria) is also known as bottle gourd, white-flowered gourd, long melon, birdhouse gourd, New Guinea bean, New Guinea butter bean, Tasmania bean, zucca melon, and opo squash.
• One calabash gourd grown in Taylorsville, Kentucky in 2001 weighed 111.5 kg (246 lb).