The Gourd and the Palm-tree

The fable first appeared in the west in the Latin prose work Speculum Sapientiae (Mirror of wisdom),[1] which groups its accounts into four themed sections.

The Speculum Sapientiae was eventually translated into German under the title Das buch der Natürlichen weißheit by Ulrich von Pottenstein (c. 1360–1417) and first printed in 1490.

In 1564 a poetic version of the fable was included under its Latin title of Cucurbita et Palma in Hieronymus Osius' Fabulae Aesopi carmine elegiaco redditae and so entered the Aesopic tradition.

[3] An anonymous translation later appeared in the New York Mirror[4] in 1833 and a poetic version by Mrs Elizabeth Jessup Eames in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1841.

[8] A different device accompanied Johann Ebermeier's treatment of the fable in his Neu poetisch Hoffnungs-Gärtlein (new poetic pleasance of hope, Tübingen, 1653).

There it illustrates the moral that prosperity is short and the story is told of either a pine or an olive tree (seu olae) next to which a gourd grows, only to die lamenting in winter.

"Be not, my friend, so much delighted with the first precarious address of every fickle zephyr: consider, the frosts may yet return; and if thou covetest an equal share with me in all the glories of the rising year, do not afford to them an opportunity to nip thy beauties in the bud.

The first European recorder of the fable, Boniohannes de Messana, was from the Sicilian Crusader port now called Messina, so there is the possibility that the story reached there from the Eastern Mediterranean and is of West Asian origin.

For example, Rumi's 13th century Persian classic, the Masnavi, employs it to picture the imitative person hasty for spiritual growth: Later support for the oriental origin of the fable seems to be given by an American claim that a poem beginning "How old art thou?