Beware the manroot!
In this Spring season, more than in seasons past, I’ve been seeing an incredible lot of wild cucumber flowering along my favorite Bay Area trails. The wild cucumber, Latin name Marah macrocarpus, is a member of the Cucurbitaceae, or gourd family. It is quite a pretty vine when it flowers, and does bear resemblance to most garden-variety cucumber plants. But that’s where the similarity ends.
A wild cucumber flowers along the Zinfandel Trail in the hills of Cupertino, California
For while you would eat a garden-grown cucumber, the last thing you’ll want to do - should you ever find yourself foraging for food in the wilderness - is chow down on the fruit of the wild cucumber, also known as bigroot, manroot, and old-man-in-the-ground.
How is such a pretty vine accorded such an unflattering name? While I must admit to not having dug one up personally, apparently the taproot of the wild cucumber is large, fleshy, alternately woody, and can weigh up to one hundred pounds. But if that doesn’t intrigue you very much, the main thing you should know about the manroot regards the fruit that it bears: the seeds of the manroot are extremely poisonous.
The soft spines of the fruit of the manroot. I discovered this cuke along the Sunol-Ohlone Trail on the return leg of an early-April hike to Murietta Falls.
Like many of Nature’s local denizens, the wild cucumber is a plant worthy of admiration. But mostly, it deserves the healthy respect that comes from knowledge gained. I probably don’t have to tell you that it’s better to take a picture than to take a swallow!
