snake gourd

Description:

Trichosanthes cucumerina is a tropical or subtropical vine, raised for its strikingly long fruit, used as a vegetable,Monoecious annual herb, climbing by 2–3-branched tendrils. Flowers unisexual, regular, 5-merous, white; calyx tubular; corolla lobes fringed with hairlike outgrowths; male flowers in 5–many-flowered axillary racemes on 10–30 cm long peduncles, with 3 stamens; female flowers solitary and sessile, with inferior, 1-celled ovary, long-hairy, stigmas 3.