Unravelling the Messy History of the Watermelon

Carl Peter Thunberg was a Swedish naturalist and a pupil of the father of modern taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus. He is remembered in several plants familiar to gardeners, especially Thunbergia alata (black-eyed Susan) and Berberis thunbergii. In 1773, collecting plants in South Africa, he found and pressed a new plant that he named Citrullus lanatus or, to you and me, watermelon. The pressed specimen is still in the herbarium in Uppsala in Sweden.
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