Tendrils are threadlike, coiling organs differentiated from specialized lateral shoots initiated at leaf axils, and which function in mechanical support of plants with a vining habit of growth. Morphologically, they are commonly comprised of a basal stem or shoot axis of variable length which branches into tendrils which are thigmotropic, coiling around objects in which they come in contact. They are a ubiquitous organ within the Cucurbitaceae family (5, 7), but do not appear to confer any substantial advantage to domesticated cucurbits mostly grown in row cultural systems employed in modern agricultural practice. In the genus Cucurbita, many of the new modern cultivars have a bush or semi-bush habit of growth, and it was stated in the classical book on Cucurbits by Whitaker and Davis (9) that bush squashes “differ from the common trailing varieties by their much-shortened internodes and lack of tendrils.” At the time the “Cucurbits” book was published in 1962, most bush varieties of squash were types grown for consumptions of immature squash, and characterized by extremely shortened internodes, a phenotype likely conferred by several genes, and not the single incompletely dominant Bu gene described by Shifriss in 1947 (8). In the current breeding germplasm of ornamental pumpkin and winter squash at the University of New Hampshire, both bush and vine forms are represented among the three major economic species, C. pepo L., C. moschata Duch., and C. maxima Duch., and we have found that presence of tendrils is the rule and not the exception in bush plants. This report summarizes the relationship of the basal shoot or stem length in tendrils to internode length in several breeding lines representing bush and vine genotypes among the three economically important species of squash and pumpkin.