Painted Serpent

Painted Serpent is a striped selection in the flexuosus group of Cucumis melo — botanically a melon, but grown, trellised and eaten as a cucumber, and sold variously as Striped Armenian or Metki Painted Serpent. Fedco calls it one of the oldest heirlooms in its catalog and traces it to Armenia, from where it reached Italy in the fifteenth century. What separates it from plain Armenian cucumber is the striping: alternating light and dark green bands running the length of ribbed, faintly fuzzy fruit that curls into loose S-shaped coils when left to sprawl. Because it is a melon rather than Cucumis sativus, the skin is thin enough that it never needs peeling and the flesh carries neither bitterness nor the burp that follows ordinary slicers. Growers who want straight fruit trellis it; growers who want the ornamental coil let it run on the ground.