From the archives: Montreal melon comes home

This story was first published on Sept 10, 1999, in the Montreal Gazette.
 
In an N.D.G. community garden, tucked behind tennis courts, a children’s playground and the YMCA, the green tendrils of a supposedly extinct plant are poking through a fence.
This isn’t just any extinct plant we’re talking about. This is the Montreal melon: a big, green-fleshed fruit that used to be as familiar to people in this city as McIntosh apples are now. Even more so, perhaps, for the&n