Pumpkin power! How this garish gourd took over the world | Halloween

I’m in a field in Pontefract watching a masked, miniature Spider-Man clamber through a heart-shaped pumpkin arch as his dad, in a pumpkin bucket hat, takes pics. To my left, a family in russet, pumpkin-themed knitwear queue for their turn on a plaid-blanket-draped bench beneath a Hello Pumpkin sign; to my right, a dutiful Instagram boyfriend captures his partner – wellies, impeccable ’fit and killer pout – in front of a Chevy truck full of pale-yellow squashes.

The fields beyond are dotted with orange orbs. People walk among them with wheelbarrows, silhouetted against the sun, like figures from a Millet painting as they bend to examine promising specimens; toddlers stagger around with pumpkins bigger than they are. As I stare, an orange-faced scarecrow with a pretty intense energy comes and compliments my husband on his orange jacket, then chides me for not dressing up. “Not all witches wear green and have pointy hats,” he says, then picks my husband up like a giant pumpkin and urges me to take a picture.

What in gourd’s name is going on? This is Farmer Copleys pumpkin festival: it’s decorative gourd season and the UK has gone pumpkin mad. Step into your local supermarket and it’s immediately apparent: “Enter if you dare” reads an orange arch in my Sainsbury’s, and do I? There are pumpkin mugs, tealight holders, slipper socks, bibs, babygrows and adorable hat and jumper sets. Asda has fidget spinners, subtle pale green pumpkin soap dispensers with matching toothbrush beakers, and chunky knitted “Fair Isle” ones, while B&M offers “boucle stacking pumpkins”. Lucy Sweet of the Lucyverse newsletter, which plumbs the depths of ill-advised seasonal retail, has spotted more: “This is particularly gourd-forsaken,” she says, showing me, in quick succession, a nutcracker with a pumpkin face and a “harvest gnome” holding one, a ceramic Highland cow bathing in a pumpkin, and a pumpkin-shaped LED lantern with crosses for eyes.

Why this obsession? Because I must declare a (lack of) interest: I don’t get pumpkins. When I was little, at Halloween, we hacked at a swede for hours, hung it from a string with a candle in and that was it. Plus, my kids grew up in Belgium where Halloween was a pumpkin-free non-event. I’ve never enjoyed eating them – the only pumpkin pie I ever ate was so disgusting I’ve refused to try it again. But the evidence is overwhelming: pumpkins are taking over as an aesthetic, an autumn flavouring and full-on festivity. I need to learn to love, or at least understand, our new orange overlords.

Despite my stepfather – chief swede whittler – claiming there were “no pumpkins in the north before 1986”, the pumpkin is not a recent arrival to the UK. Native to the Americas, they arrived here with New World exploration in the early 16th century. When a country that had known only “bottle gourds and cucumbers” first caught sight of them, “Our minds were blown because they were colourful and tasty”, says food historian Annie Gray, author of The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker. We preserved them and baked them in pies: a 1598 recipe, she tells me, calls for grated pumpkin boiled with “udder suet” (and other delights), sugar, saffron and cinnamon, and baked in a pastry shell. But their popularity as a food waned – for the Victorians, they were more a horticultural curiosity.

Pumpkin spice – that bullying blend of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and allspice – has taken over the world, but you see less orange-fleshed food about, probably, Gray says, because people try to eat carving pumpkins and get put off: “They’re grown specifically to cut, so they taste horrible.” Gray recommends investigating the “wider world of squashes”, and suggests I test a recipe first seen in the 1650s for “pompion pye”: a “weird”, she admits, pumpkin omelette in pastry with unhinged seasonings – nutmeg, cinnamon and mace, but also oregano, rosemary, thyme and parsley.

Meanwhile, having put out a call for palatable pumpkin recipes, I am inundated with sensible, even tempting, suggestions from pumpkin propagandists – soups, curries and spiced flatbreads; any number of ways of tackling the gourd’s naturally sweet blandness. I’m lazy, though, so instead I scour the supermarket for pumpkin products: gnocchi are palatable, but pointless; pumpkin fritters with edamame and ginger would be nicer without the pumpkin; pumpkin-spiced oat milk is like suckling a seasonal plug-in air freshener, but, in fairness, that’s the spices, not the 2% pumpkin puree. Discouraged, I park the “pye” for now.

Whether or not you care to eat pumpkin, everyone has encountered the grimacing lantern format, a Celtic tradition using turnips and even potatoes that crossed the Atlantic to become huge, orange, business. Even I have carved a few, knives skidding off the impenetrable skin, the inner ooze, seeds and stringy bits flying everywhere. Why so slimy, pumpkins? “It’s probably the bit I dislike the most,” says Jamie Jones, self-confessed Pumpkin Freak and UK carver extraordinaire. Jones started carving after watching the US show Halloween Wars while “horribly hungover” one year, and deciding to have a go. He hosted a pumpkin carving party and “from there, it’s just spiralled out of control”. He now takes two weeks off work each year to produce extraordinary bespoke pumpkins for corporates and individuals, charging £300 to £1500. No wonder: it can take Jones and his miniature chisels up to 20 hours to create masterpieces, such as a Night of the Living Dead mastergourd or “Putkin” (Putin in pumpkin form – haunting). In 2020, his first professional year, “I literally carved until my fingers were bleeding; I had huge blisters”.

Pumpkins and Halloween are inextricably linked, but Big Pumpkin’s ambitions now reach far beyond mere spooky carving: they’ve muscled their way to the heart of a whole “Fall” aesthetic and it’s coming for British autumn. In Pontefract, I meet a few carvers, but people are also browsing to create artful uncarved seasonal displays and many more are here purely “for the gram”. “Work it,” a giggling woman in leopard print, huge shades and a bold red lip, tells her friend, who is posing dramatically by the giant pick ‘n’ mix crates of multicoloured squashes. Andy and Kayla are posing their son Jacob next to a pile of gourds for the third year running. “The first year, we came away with a lot of pumpkins.” “Too many pumpkins?” I ask, but he just laughs. Smudge the dalmatian is working his angles in an autumnal russet harness by a pumpkin-decorated kennel. He’s a model, and his owner-managers Claire and Mike are getting shots for his Insta. “We only come for nice pictures with him,” says Mike. “He enjoys it.”

“This weekend, I saw seven dogs in a queue for a photo op,” says Rob Copley, AKA Farmer Copley himself, when I sit down with him and wife, Heather, to try to understand the phenomenon. Copley was an early adopter: “I believe I am the first person in the UK to do a pumpkin festival,” he says. “Where did it come from? I stole it from America, obviously.” After getting ideas from farm marketing conferences stateside, the germ of today’s festival was born in 2006. “I grew a few pumpkins, we put them in a square in the shop and let kids come and carve them.” The next year, “I grew an acre and a half of pumpkins; we had some cut-outs of witches and a burger van”. It was immediately popular, doubling in size every year until 2017 when, one weekend, “20,000 people tried to get into the farm to pick pumpkins. There was a 12-mile tailback”.

Now Copley caps capacity at 8,000 a day, but the festival gets more elaborate each year. This year, there are 300,000 pumpkins of nearly 50 varieties, vintage fairground rides, live music, street food, toast your own s’mores, story-telling and fancy dress. Heather dresses up as a green witch and tells kids the story of Spookley the Square Pumpkin (a celebration of diversity): “Sometimes I think, I went to university and now I’m doing dog fancy dress …” In recent years, Copley says, “It’s more to do with Instagram and TikTok and Facebook”, but it’s also a tradition that has built organically, with families returning year on year, marking the passage of time at the “How Tall this Fall” sign. If you can bag a photo there eight years running, you get free entry for life; usually it’s £6.70 off-peak, peak is a mysterious £8.76, and under-threes go free.

Copleys Pumpkin festival is a month-long juggernaut, but there’s more and more competition. I count five pumpkin patches in my immediate area, a phenomenon replicated around the country. “I’ve never seen so many pop-ups as this year,” says Copley. “I think it’s because farmers are struggling a bit and they’re seeing it as quite an easy diversification.”

Tom Pearcy, chairman of the National Farm Attractions Network, agrees: “The pumpkin market is getting very busy,” he says, estimating 90% of his members are in the gourd game, with many finding it’s their busiest season. “The growth of pumpkins has really been exponential since the Instagram generation,” he says, dating its wholescale adoption in the UK to the Walmart takeover of Asda in 1999. “I don’t know whether it’s just the Instagrammability of little orange globes, but farm attractions have been very good at creating nice photo ops, nice food and all these bits and pieces.”

Pearcy was another pumpkin patch pioneer (his York Maze business has now pivoted to a scarier “Hallowscream” concept); he famously paddled a giant pumpkin down the River Ouse in 2018 to promote it, the only pumpkin event to penetrate my consciousness, until now. “It probably wasn’t the brightest idea I’ve ever had, Emma,” he says. “It was the most unstable thing, one wobble and it felt like it was going over. Then, because it was full of wet mush inside, the wet cold liquid froze my knees. I was in absolute agony. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else.”

Besides, there are better things to do with pumpkins. Back in Pontefract, Linda and Lindsay are purposefully filling their barrow. “In our porch, we do a display. We’re going to do one as Frankenstein, one as a bat, a grinch … whatever takes our fancy, lots of different colours.” I ask them for advice on making the most of my day. “Wander around,” Linda advises me, “Make sure you have a glass of prosecco while you’re doing it, and pick the pumpkins you want.” I do, and find there’s a delicious scent of toasted marshmallow, the gentle twang of country music and happy families pushing barrows in all directions, discussing which pumpkins to pick. I barely hear a single argument; everyone is grabbing a few hours of orange joy. How lovely; how un-British.

I plump for Copley’s recommended “traditional eating pumpkin”, then when I get home, high on all this wholesomeness, I decide it’s time to make pompion pye. I fry pumpkin, and add eggs, sugar and the bizarre herb and spice blend to make a “froise”(or froiz – a medieval term for this omelette thing). I layer it in a shortcrust shell with apples and currants (well, raisins) then bake. When it emerges, I pour a “caudle” – a custard of egg yolk and sweet wine – down the central hole. Once it cools, I cut a slice and taste cautiously. It’s … actually not that bad. My husband, who hates pumpkin spice with the heat of a thousand suns, actually eats two slices. It’s a Fall miracle.

Of course, after a month of Cinderella-style glow-up, come 1 November, pumpkins turn back into, well, pumpkins. “They’re absolutely worthless,” as Pearcy puts it. What about all the waste? At Copleys, signs explain that 18,000 tonnes of pumpkin are wasted each year, hoping to persuade people to eat their purchases. The farm usually ends up with about 10% unsold most years. “The Americans do what they call a pumpkin smash,” Copley tells me. “People come with baseball bats and hit ’em, drop ’em out of helicopters, they fire ’em out of cannons. It just doesn’t sit well with me.” Instead, those that don’t get picked get ploughed back into the soil. “They’re worm food.” Hearing that, I feel an instinctive, immediate pang of sympathy for the poor unpicked pumpkins. Maybe I finally get the gourd?