OBJECT IN VIEW: A past future for the cucumber

This long hollow tube is a mysterious object to find in a garden. Its glass is slightly green, uneven and wavy, yet it feels light, delicate, fragile and easily broken. At the top the glass is pinched and shaped into a button, opening into an open hollow tube, a stretched version of the more familiar horticultural “cloche” or bell jar.1 This cylinder of delicate glass is a rare survivor from the mid-nineteenth century: a relic of another time and a past dream of straightening cucumbers for better sandwiches. The Gardener’s Chronicle of April 1848 reports the Stockport Cucumber Show’s obsession with the “cucumber in its perfect proportions.” The winner was "22 1/2 inches, perfectly straight and level as the barrel of a gun.”2 A straightener assisted in persuading nature to full perfection. But this was not without risks, as the famous Mrs Beeton noted: “When the tubes are used, it is sometimes necessary to watch them, in order that, during the swelling of the fruit, they are not wedged into the tubes so tightly that they are difficult to withdraw.”3 A crooked cucumber met a different fate: if they were “small, crooked or discoloured” they were given to the pigs.4 In a stove or glasshouse, cucumbers were often trained into straighteners on a trellis angled just below the glass roof. Mrs Beeton described the power of gravity thus: Cucumbers are sometimes allowed to trail over a trellis. By this means the fruit are suspended, and no glass tubes are required to keep them straight, some, even when grown on a bed, are tied up with sticks for the same purpose.6.