Home Page > Picture Archives > Flora of Qatar > Cucurbitaceae > Lagenaria siceraria

Lagenaria siceraria (Molina) Standl.

Synonyms

Cucumis bicirrha, Cucumis lagenaria, Cucumis mairei, Cucurbita ciceraria, Cucurbita idolatrica, Cucurbita idololatrica, Cucurbita lagenaria, Cucurbita leucantha, Cucurbita pyriformis, Cucurbita siceraria, Cucurbita vittata, Lagenaria bicornuta, Lagenaria idolatrica, Lagenaria lagenaria, Lagenaria leucantha, Lagenaria microcarpa, Lagenaria vulgaris

Common names

Bottle gourd, calabash

Extract from Wikipedia article

The calabash, bottle gourd, or white-flowered gourd, Lagenaria siceraria (synonym Lagenaria vulgaris Ser.), also known as opo squash (from Tagalog: upo) or long melon, is a vine grown for its fruit, which can either be harvested young and used as a vegetable, or harvested mature, dried, and used as a bottle, utensil, or pipe. The fresh fruit has a light-green smooth skin and a white flesh. Rounder varieties are called calabash gourds. They grow in a variety of shapes: they can be huge and rounded, small and bottle shaped, or slim and serpentine, more than a metre long. Because bottle gourds are also called "calabashes", they are sometimes confused with the hard, hollow fruits of the unrelated calabash tree, Crescentia cujete, whose fruits are also used to make utensils, containers, and musical instruments. The gourd was one of the first cultivated plants in the world, grown not primarily for food, but for use as water containers. The bottle gourd may have been carried from Africa to Asia, Europe, and the Americas in the course of human migration, or by seeds floating across the oceans inside the gourd. It has been proven to be in the New World prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus.

Flower of bottle gourd (calabash, Lagenaria siceraria) on Al Abeer Street in Al Luqta area. Doha, Qatar, January 14, 2016
Al Abeer St, Doha, Qatar

Bottle gourd (calabash, Lagenaria siceraria) on a fence on Al Abeer Street in Al Luqta area. Doha, Qatar, January 14, 2016
Al Abeer St, Doha, Qatar

Links

• Flora of Qatar.
• Unknown plants or plants without names.
• Duplicate and extra pictures of plants.
• Earlier version of collection of plants.
• Other collections of pictures from Qatar: Lizards of Qatar, Cats of Qatar, Camels of Qatar, and Fish of Qatar.
• Picture archives.
• Home page of A. Sergeev.

Outside links

• Lagenaria siceraria, Wikipedia article
• Lagenaria siceraria from www.theplantlist.org
• Ekhlas M. M. Abdel Bary, The Flora of Qatar, Volume I: The Dicotyledons. Doha 2012
• Flora of Qatar, Volume II: The Monocotyledons
• Illustrated Checklist of the Flora of Qatar. John Norton et al. 2009
• Qatar eNature. Flora
• Ali Al-Rawi, Flowering plants of Kuwait, 1985
• Plants of Kuwait
• Flora of Saudi Arabia, Al-Qassim Region
• Flora of Eastern Saudi Arabia by Rain and Dust at Flickr
• Plants of South-Western Morocco
• Pictures from Qatar (Flickr/cpmkutty)
• Arabian plants by Gary Brown
• Flora of Israel

How the web page was created

• A list of plants with their common names was written using online sources and books.
• Web pages were written by a program consisting of several scripts.
• Full names, synonyms, and classification of plants were found online from catalogueoflife.org and theplantlist.org using a script.
• Pictures of plants were selected from a database using a script.
• This web page was written using a script.

Acknowledgements

QNHG (Qatar Natural History Group) and associated people, for a possibility to participate in their field excursions and to learn about local nature.