Montreal melons: A city's forgotten fruit, and the modern farms preserving its agricultural heritage

The Montreal melon is the story of a unique fruit to the city: Known for its light, sweet taste, distinct from other melons, it was once a local delicacy but disappeared for decades.

High-end restaurants and hotels in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia would order large shipments of these melons, selling them at extremely high prices, and they could be found on the dining tables of royalty.

Today, it’s being kept alive when grown at Montreal’s old Hippodrome site known locally as the Blue Bonnets Farm, researchers like Bernard Lavallée, and even David McMillan and his Hayfield Farm in Saint-Armand, Quebec.

“It's an oddity because as it's a ‘Montreal’ melon, we have a little bit of pride about it. People are very curious whenever I post about them,” David told us during a delivery run to chef Ari Schor at Beba.

“It's fun to keep it alive. I wish more people grew it.”

When life gives you melons

Jesuits brought the Montreal melon, also known as the Montreal market muskmelon or the Montreal nutmeg melon, to Quebec in the late 17th century and it became very popular by the late 19th and early 20th centuries following popularization by seed merchant W. Atlee Burpee in 1881.

Grown in parts of the city now known as Côte-Des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-De-Grâce, Outremont, and the Town of Mount Royal, it was widely cultivated on the Montreal Plain between the St. Lawrence River and Mount Royal. However, it all but disappeared by the 1950s as Montreal grew, and its delicate rind made it unsuitable for large-scale agribusiness.

“It was grown between Sherbrooke Street and Monkland pre-housing addresses; think before the automobile,” David Macmillan recalls.

“There were thousands upon thousands of horses that are servicing the homes of Westmount. All the stables are around Villa Maria and below Monkland, possibly where NDG Park is, basically north of Benny Farm.

So those were giant slopes, and the Montreal melon thrives in horse manure, right? There were no cars, everybody's car was a horse, and Montreal has massive amounts of horse manure from  servicing wealthy people's homes with all the stables there.”

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The melon has a distinctive appearance, ribbed like a pumpkin with a spiderweb exterior like a cantaloupe. Its flesh is light green, almost melting in the mouth, with a spicy flavour reminiscent of nutmeg—when perfectly ripe, some say it has a superb taste, reminiscent of a blend between cantaloupe and honeydew.

“We're used to like supermarket melons that are so intensely sweet, where this has a lot more character to it,” Ari says, tasting one. “When they get to really ripen fully, you get that aroma to them, you cut it open, and it's a completely different thing.”

“It's the same thing with Japanese melons. The last one that I had was not as sweet as you would expect even when fully ripe, but it's just a complexity of flavor.”

During its heyday, it was larger than any other melon cultivated on the continent, with some specimens weighing up to 44 pounds, though those between 8 to 15 pounds were considered the best in quality.

The two most famous families to grow the melon were the Décarie and Gorman families, with each family's melons having distinct shapes—Gorman’s was more oblong, while Décarie’s was rounder. When these families sold their fields for infrastructure construction, much of the knowledge about growing the melon was lost. As the city and food systems became more industrialized, the Montreal melon became too expensive and labour-intensive to cultivate.

By the mid-20th century, it had disappeared from the island.

The comeback melon

In the 1990s, a Montreal journalist tracked down the seeds in a U.S. seed bank maintained by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Ames, Iowa, and gave them to a local farmer, reviving the melon.

There were initial doubts about whether the strain was truly the authentic Montreal melon, but someone who had grown up eating it conducted taste tests, and for years now, growers have been cultivating and selecting the best seeds. Since its rediscovery in 1996, the melon has enjoyed a renaissance among Montreal-area gardeners, with initiatives to bring it back gaining momentum.

“This one had to of blown someone's mind in 1910,” McMillan says as he tastes a slice. “Today we get real sweet, sweet, sweet, and crazy hybrid melons.”

If it's a good product, there's nothing to do, which is usually the easiest and best thing,” Ari says. “But if all of them ripen at once, you talk to the bartender and you make a melonade or something like that.”

“I see it almost being treated as a savory appetizer,” David adds. “Served with tarragon, olive oil, and salt, for example.”

While it’s uncertain what the future holds for this melon—whether it will taste as good as remembered or not—there’s an element of excitement in the uncertainty. The Montreal melon isn’t something you’ll find at the grocery store or most local fruit shops, but you can buy the seeds online.

That makes growing this melon is more than just cultivating a fruit; it’s about preserving a piece of agricultural history.