A bottle gourd on a pumpkin plant. Surprising as it sounds, a fruit like that is hanging among the pumpkins at the home of Swapan Sana, a resident of Shaktigarh in Purba Bardhaman, India. The pumpkin plant has also cropped well. The sight has caused a stir across the area, and local people have crowded in to see it.

Swapan Sana said he had planted ordinary pumpkin seedlings. As the vine grew it started bearing pumpkins, but then he suddenly saw a bottle gourd hanging among them. Hearing the news, agricultural researchers from the district came to his house, and word also reached the local horticulture office. The officials there, however, were not surprised.

Palash Santra, an officer at the district's assistant horticulture office, said this simply could not happen. Several crops can be grown on one plant by grafting, he said, but not something like this. "If the pumpkin plant grew from seed, how could it bear a bottle gourd? What is being taken for a bottle gourd may not be one. It is impossible to say what it really is without cutting the fruit and examining it."

After seeing a photograph of the fruit, he later said it was a genetic disorder of the plant, which he named albinism. The pumpkin plant has in fact produced a pumpkin, he said, but albinism has changed the colour of the fruit, so it looks like a bottle gourd. Cut it open and it will be a pumpkin, not a bottle gourd.

Swapan Sana is now waiting to cut the fruit, because agriculturists say its real secret will come out once it is cut.

Source: Jagonews24. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.