If there’s a Royal Family in the North American botanical world, it’s the legendary Three Sisters: corn, beans and squash. And if there’s a star of the squash family, it’s the big, bright, utterly voluptuous pumpkin. Even their brilliant yellow flowers are huge, lighting up the pumpkin patch like the Las Vegas strip for local bees.

Their cousins include hundreds of varieties of squash in a dizzying range of shapes and colours: there’s round, pear-shaped and elongated; smooth, warty, ribbed and furrowed; striped and speckled; white, yellow, orange – even blue-grey. From the humble zucchini to the exotic turban squash, they may not be as ‘bootylicious’ as the pumpkin, but they’re hardy, nutritious and easily cultivated. These plants formed an essential source of food, fiber and medicine for 7000 years of Native life in the Americas.

The name pumpkin comes down to us through a botanical broken telephone: pumpkin started out as the Greek word for melon, ‘pepon’. ‘Pepon’ was nasalized by the French into ‘pompon’. ‘Pompon’ was distorted by the English into ‘pumpion’ (Shakespeare mentions pumpion in Merry Wives of Windsor). Finally, North American colonists transformed ‘pumpion’ into what we have today: pumpkin.

From Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater to The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, to Cinderella, pumpkins have taken a unique place in our collective imaginations. But the ultimate cultural symbol pops up on front porches every October: the Jack O’Lantern. It began with an Irish myth about “Stingy Jack”, a ne’er-do-well who nevertheless had the wit to outsmart the devil – twice. His deal ensured that, when he died, the devil couldn’t claim his soul. Unfortunately, when the time came and he arrived at the pearly gates, God turned him down as well. Jack was forced to wander the earth forever with only a burning coal, carried in a carved out turnip, to light his way.

From this tale a tradition emerged: Irish, Scottish and, eventually, English households would carve a scary face into a potato, turnip or large beet, illuminate it with a candle inside, and place it in a window or doorway to scare away wandering spirits. When these immigrants to the new world found the pumpkin, the custom was immediately transferred to this bigger, better sculptural opportunity.

The best measure of a plant’s importance to humans is to look at the amount of symbolic and mythic meaning attached to it. Pumpkin legend and lore is so rich and diverse, it’s no wonder some Native Americans called them the ‘apple of God’.