Bur-cucumber

Sicyos angulatus, the bur-cucumber or one-seeded bur cucumber, is an annual climbing vine in the Cucurbitaceae native to moist alluvial woods, streambanks, thickets, and field edges across much of eastern and central North America. Plants produce slender, angled, sticky-hairy stems 3 to 8 metres long that climb vigorously by means of branched tendrils opposite the leaves. The alternate leaves are broadly ovate to suborbicular in outline, 7 to 20 cm wide, palmately three- to five-lobed with shallow, acute lobes and a deeply cordate base, with a rough, hispid texture and long petioles. The plant is monoecious: small, greenish-white, five-lobed staminate flowers about 1 cm across are arranged in long-stalked corymbose racemes, while the pistillate flowers occur in small, dense, sessile clusters in the same axil. Fruits develop in tight cluster-balls of small, ovoid, one-seeded, bristly burs 1 to 2 cm long covered with long, hooked, white prickles that cling to fur and clothing for dispersal.