STORY BEHIND THE ART OF BENJAMIN LANDER
24th Annual International
American Society of Botanical Artists and Marin Art and Garden Center
California Wild Cucumber aka Cucumonga Manroot
Marah macrocarpa
My fascination with nature, and particularly with plants, began very early in life. As a youth I loved tramping through the woods and fields of Pennsylvania and upstate New York, learning the names of all the trees, the bellyflowers, and everything in between. I’ve been fortunate to have lived in many beautiful environments: the mountains of Colorado, the coastal bluffs and redwood forests of northern California, the woods and prairies, rivers and lakes of Minnesota. In each of these places I’ve been drawn to the outdoors to see and to learn.
Several years ago, my husband and I began annual visits to the deserts of southern California as a respite from winter’s cold. There I found a landscape quite unlike any I’d lived in before. Particularly before the winter rains, there was very little green to be found, just lots of dry, sharp, unfamiliar things: a sere landscape of tans and grays and browns. It was on my first hike up Whitewater Canyon, north of Palm Springs, that my eye was caught by a spiky, golden orb tangled amongst the branches of a dried-out shrub. Having gingerly teased it free, I carefully carried it home and promptly hung it by a thread from a shelf over my drawing table where, for several seasons, it practically dared me to pick up my pencil. During our first summer of Covid I finally took up the challenge.
What I had collected turned out to be the dried seedpod of the California wild cucumber, Marah macrocarpa. Though its color had first attracted my attention, its ferocious form is what has continued to fascinate me: the ovoid shape and those lethal-looking spikes. I felt that graphite would be the perfect medium to capture the hard and prickly essence.
Though I’d love to take credit for designing the elegant sweep of the stem that frames the seedpod, what you see is precisely what nature created, as the vining stem wove its way through the supporting scaffold, held fast by twisting tendrils. It has been rendered exactly life-size.
Marah are perennial monoecious flowering plants in the gourd family (Cucurbitaceae), native to western North America. They share a common name and a similar habit to Echinocystis lobata, the annual wild cucumber native throughout the US including my home state of Minnesota.
Marah macrocarpa is common in much of southern California and Baja California, inhabiting a range far more arid than other Marah species. The vines appear in late winter in response to increased rainfall and, with coiling tendrils, can climb up other plants to a height of twenty feet or more. The leaves typically have five lobes, but individual plants can show considerable variation. The large spiky fruits are striking and readily recognized. Their anthropomorphic common name manroot comes from the large tuberous root that in older plants may be the size and shape of a sleeping man. As all parts of the plant are mildly toxic, it is not considered to be edible.
Through many seasons I have grown to know and to love the desert, from its desiccated slumber to the colorful explosion of its springtime bloom. I continue to discover fascinating, beautiful, and exotic forms that surely will keep my pencils and brushes busy for years to come.
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