Coyote Melon, a member of the gourd family, Curcurbitaceae, is native to the Southwest of the United States. It is found in southeastern California and southwestern Arizona, as well as the northern parts of the Baja Peninsula¹. It has also been called Coyote Gourd, not because coyotes themselves have anything to do with them, but because they exist in territory also inhabited by coyotes. Flowers are yellow and resemble other gourd flowers. It is the rightmost flower in this page’s top banner.
Leaves are a dark green with lighter veins and palmately lobed.
It ambles over the ground, preferring loose, well-drained sandy soil, as do many desert plants. It is drought-adapted and the melons, when fresh, do store some moisture, but when they dry out, the plant needs regular (weekly) water to survive if you’re in a hot, dry climate. Stems and leaves are hairy; when these dry out, they can become prickly.
It is a nice annual plant for a desert garden for its very pretty ornamental dusty green palmate leaves, green melons with white stripes, and very sweet way of meandering through the garden. Desert gardens are rarely over-populated, so its behavior and foliage never suggested “weed.”
Jepson lists it as an annual or a perennial, but in my garden it was strictly an annual, dying each season, but leaving behind at least one gourd (and often many) for a full supply of seeds for the following year. Perhaps at a lower elevation (below 4,000 ft.) it would survive perennially.
Melons turn yellow as they dry, then, finally, a cream beige. They are not really “craft” material — too fragile, unless you handle them extremely carefully.
Seeds are plentiful from one melon and sprout readily when the soil types and moisture requirements are met. It prefers the hot, arid, desert climates but probably not the desert floor, where conditions are the harshest.
¹
The melons are delicate when dry, firm but rather like egg shells, and not exactly tough enough for the various ornamental crafts that one could make from other types of gourds.
References:
Wikipedia, Coyote Melon, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucurbita_palmata, January 2016.