Watermelon is a vine-like flowering plant originally from southern Africa.
The flowering plants, also known as Angiospermae or Magnoliophyta, are the most diverse group of land plants, with 416 families, approx. 13,164 known genera and a total of ca 295,383 known species.
Southern Africa is the southernmost region of the African continent, variably defined by geography or geopolitics, and including several countries.
Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most-populous continent.
It is a large, sprawling annual plant with coarse, hairy pinnately-lobed leaves and white to yellow flowers.
An annual plant is a plant that completes its life cycle, from germination to the production of seed, within one year, and then dies.
It is grown for its large edible fruit, also known as a watermelon, which is a special kind of berry with a hard rind and no internal division, botanically called a pepo.
Water is a transparent fluid which forms the world's streams, lakes, oceans and rain and is the major constituent of the fluids of organisms.
In botanical terminology, a berry is a fleshy fruit without a stone produced from a single flower containing one ovary.
Botany, also called plant science, plant biology or phytology, is the science of plant life and a branch of biology.
The fruit has a smooth hard rind—usually green with dark green stripes or yellow spots—and a sweet, juicy interior flesh—usually deep red to pink, but sometimes orange, yellow, or white—with many seeds, which can be soft and white or hard and black.
Considerable breeding effort has been put into disease-resistant varieties and into developing a "seedless" strain with only digestable white seeds.
Many cultivars are available, producing mature fruit within 100 days of planting the crop.
A cultivar is a plant or grouping of plants selected for desirable characteristics that can be maintained by propagation.
The fruit can be eaten raw, pickled or the rind cooked.