Winter Squash Cucurbita maxima
Winter Squash is an introduced annual vine, found in the lower 48 states, the Pacific Basin, and Puerto Rico. It grows to 21 ft.
More about this plant
Cucurbita maxima, one of at least five species of cultivated squash, is one of the most diverse domesticated species. This species originated in South America from the wild subspecies Cucurbita maxima subsp. andreana over 4,000 years ago. Cucurbita maxima, known for modern varieties as Hubbard, Delicious, Marblehead, Boston Marrow, and Turks Turban, originated in northern Argentina near the Andes or in certain Andean valleys. Secondary centers of diversity include India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and the southern Appalachians. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 5 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 21 ft
- Lifespan
- Annual
- Foliage
- Evergreen broadleaf
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~15 caterpillar species
Cucurbita supports ~15 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a moderate genus.
Recorded feeding on Cucurbita in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees specialist-bee host · 23 bee visitors
Specialist native bees depend on it.
Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen from particular plant genera. Cucurbita is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
23 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Winter Squash — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 1 bird · 2 mammals · 1 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Winter Squash — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 bird and 2 mammals species (fruit, seed, browse):
1 adult butterfly & moth species is recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Cucurbita →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
Sources for this entry (24) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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