Pumpkin Flowers

Living at elevation, specifically 8,300 feet in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, we have a very short growing season that challenges any gardening aspirations. I love the act of sprouting, transplanting, nurturing, growing and finally harvesting a few of my favorite things, including two types of heirloom tomatoes that have been in my family for at least 100 years. My father saved the tomato lineage by obtaining the seeds from an elderly uncle. As the only daughter who gardens and loves fresh tomatoes, I feel a responsibility to keep saving them. And so, seven or eight years ago I found a greenhouse that would not blow away in the sometimes ferocious winds that come off the Continental Divide. Growing within right now are those heirloom tomatoes, chili peppers, garlic, herbs and two pie pumpkin vines that I string upwards on trellises as they grow to use the vertical space in the small 8 foot x 8 foot greenhouse.

Try as I might to attract them, we have too few pollinators at this elevation to guarantee that the female pumpkin flower—whose bloom lasts only 1 day—gets pollinated in order to form the pumpkins. So, I have to watch them like a hawk and, when they briefly flower, pluck a male pumpkin flower and press it to the female flower to play pollinator.

Maybe it is being so intimately involved in the life cycles of these ephemeral and quickly-vanishing flowerings that has drawn me into the symbology of the pumpkin vine and its flowers as a fertile source of imagery and symbolism for a series I am calling, “Evidence of Your Absence”, that deals with my feelings of wistfulness as we watch things change and then leave us altogether.