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# Chlorophyll Corner: Pumpkins and the Future of Fall
- URL: https://www.jeffcobeacon.com/chlorophyll-corner-pumpkins-and-the-future-of-fall/
- Published: 2026-10-13T21:00:52.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-13T21:00:52.000Z
- Description: Pumpkins feel abundant and eternal, but climate change could threaten these heralds of fall.
- Author: Eden Blooms
- Tags: Columns, Chlorophyll Corner, Fall, Autumn, Pumpkins, Climate Change, Eden Blooms

*Chlorophyll Corner is a monthly column exploring the cultural, ecological and medicinal relationships between people and plants. Grounded in ethnobotany and the One Health model, it examines how traditional plant knowledge supports our access to land‑based healing across diverse communities.*

This fall in Cascadia feels strange, like a warm, lingering summer. The season feels slightly off, like it’s trying to arrive but keeps getting pushed back by the leftover heat. As strange as this fall is, I can’t help but fall deeply in love with the sight of pumpkins just as I do every year.

This strange lingering warmth has created some truly enormous pumpkins in certain pockets of the Olympic Peninsula, where late‑season sun still meets dependable rain. Pumpkins thrive in moderate warmth, around 75 to 85 degrees, and this year the conditions aligned perfectly for a few lucky growers. 

Meanwhile, other pumpkin patches across the region and the country have been scorched by drought so severe they produced nothing at all—abundance in one place, absence in another. A climate story told through a single beloved fruit.

Summer 2026 was the hottest on record for multiple counties, with no less than an average of five major heatwaves worldwide. Forty days of heat that reshapes landscapes and seasons, the kind that doesn’t just pass through but leaves a mark. And yet pumpkins remain stitched into our imagination of fall pumpkin patches, lattes, jack‑o’-lanterns glowing on stoops, pies cooling on counters. Their bright orange aesthetic has become shorthand for the season, a cultural anchor we return to year after year. Regardless of the heat, when we see pumpkins, we know it’s fall.

Botanically, pumpkins are sprawling vines in the Cucurbitaceae family, cousins to cucumbers and gourds. The fruit is technically a pepo, which is a type of berry with a hard rind and soft interior. They come in the familiar deep orange but also white, green and every shade in between. They rely heavily on bees for pollination, especially ground‑nesting squash bees whose populations have declined due to pesticides. 

Ethnobotanically, pumpkins are ancient companions. They’re among the oldest domesticated plants on Earth, cultivated in Mesoamerica as early as 7000 to 5500 BCE. Indigenous societies across North America planted pumpkins alongside maize and beans, recognized in the tradition of the Three Sisters system, a brilliant agricultural method that sustained communities for generations. 

Pumpkins have always been food, medicine and even material, as they were roasted, dried and woven into mats. Since time in memoriam, the Indigenous people of the Americas hold agricultural knowledge that is sophisticated and deeply relational. The first Colonists depended on that knowledge, without acknowledging it, and history shows how quickly that relationship turned into betrayal. A poem from the 1630s captures how essential pumpkins were to colonial survival: “If it were not for pumpkins, we should be undoon.”

Over time, pumpkins shifted from survival food to cultural icon. Jack‑o’-lanterns came from Ireland, where Stingy Jack wandered the earth with a glowing coal tucked inside a hollowed turnip. Immigrants found pumpkins easier to carve, and the tradition transformed.

I love pumpkins so much I tattooed one on myself. Their glow feels like home—and that’s what scares me. If plants that define our sense of fall are at risk of vanishing, why don’t more people care about climate change? Maybe because pumpkins feel eternal. But they aren’t. If we want them in our future, we have to fight for the climate that made them possible.