“I once carved a pumpkin for the White House in a hotel bathroom,” says Ray Villafane, a former art teacher turned master pumpkin-carver. We are at the New York Botanical Gardens, where the largest pumpkins grown in the world are on display.
Villafane and his team, which includes a wood carver who normally makes his living creating statues for churches, are busy at work making a Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) display out of enormous pumpkins carted to the gardens, each well over 1,000lbs.
Over the sound of power tools carving chunks of pumpkin, Villafane talks about the devotion needed to create faces and creatures out of his chosen medium that look like they could be carved marble classics.
Villafane has brought pumpkins to carve on family vacations and spent countless hours perfecting his technique. His devotion is echoed by an unlikely looking group taking photos of his work, who stand out among the families and kids at the event.
They are the competitive pumpkin growers, who have flown into town to see their winning pumpkins on display. Their unofficial leader seems to be Josiah Brandt, whose pumpkin, at 2,185lbs was briefly the heaviest in the world, before another pumpkin – also on display at the gardens – broke that record, coming in at 2,230.5lbs.
Tall and serious, his face never betraying the hint of a smile, Brandt explains that growing a pumpkin that size is like having a second full-time job, with six to seven hours a day devoted to pumpkin care. “Competitive pumpkin growers don’t have lives,” Brandt explains. “Their lives are their pumpkins.”
“People tend to fall into giant pumpkin growing,” Andy Wolf, president of the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, an organization that sanctions weigh-ins and supports growers, says over the phone. It can start as a bet between friends over who can grow a bigger pumpkin and after that, says Wolf, they’re hooked.
The fascination with growing giant pumpkins can be traced back to one exceptional squash. The year was 1900 and the pumpkin weighed 400lbs, tiny by today’s supersized proportions. It was weighed at the World’s Fair in Paris and the medals awarded for it are still in possession of the family.
Wolf can tick off giant pumpkin weights and years the way some men can tell you the number of goals scored by their favorite sports players in a given year. Since the weights have gone up, so has the number of people growing giant pumpkins, which Wolf estimates to be in the thousands. The practice has even spread across the Atlantic to Europe, though it still remains largely an American pastime.
“There is a real science to it,” Wolf says in the patient tone of a man who spends a lot of time nurturing plants. “You can have the best seeds in the world, but unless you can take care of it properly, you will never grow a giant.” There are books and newsletters devoted to the latest techniques. There are tours of pumpkin patches so competitors can learn from each other.
After the pumpkins are grown and weighed at one of the over 100 Great Pumpkin Commonwealth sanctioned contests all over the world, they are usually used as displays outside stores to attract customers, says Wolf. While they are edible, the high water content makes them bland, though Wolf says that one of his giants was once cooked by chefs at the Food Network at an event for the needy in New York. “I guess if you add enough sugar and spice to anything it will taste good,” he says, laughing.
Back at the botanical gardens, Villafane is using what looks like a peeler to scrape away little chunks of pumpkin to create the eye socket of a skull.
He reflects on why he spends so much time carving his creations, which have appeared in places as far away as Hong Kong and Germany, and at supermodel Heidi Klum’s extravagant Halloween party, knowing they will quickly rot and fall apart.
“It is human nature to be fond of the things we can’t hold on to,” he says, and it is the same with carving pumpkins. None of his sculptures survive the season, but memories of the carving are what he holds on to the most.
