Pimenta da Neyde
Written by: Luciano Coelho
A friend from Brazil called Neyde (that's where the name comes from) sent me some seeds.
This plant is interesting because it's purplish and seems to be a C. annuum/C. chinense hybrid.
Even though the fruits don't resemble chinenses very much, the taste is said to be very chinense-like and the pods are supposed to be very hot.
The flowers remind purple C. annuums:
The flowers are white with purple marks.
The fruits have a purplish-chocolate colour. And the most interesting thing is that they apparently don't change colour when ripe!
The mature pods are purple (inset: small purple pod forming)
This picture shows pods at different stages, all with the same colour.
It seems that the plant produces more than one pod per node... And the leaves look a bit chinense-like.
Here you can see some closer pictures of the pods. The ruler shows that they're about 5cm long and 2cm wide:
And here is a picture of a pod split into two:
This particular pod still seems to be a bit unripe.
Very small seedling and already looking purple!
And here you can see a picture of one of my seedlings (1½ months when the picture was taken). This seedling is approxiamately 13cm in height.
You can follow the development of my seedling in this post at my forum (in Portuguese):
Pimenta-da-Neyde at Fórum Pimentas
And a few more pictures are available in this topic:
Pimenta-da-Neyde mother-plant
Photos by Neyde Hidalgo, Mário José Colombo, Jukka Kilpinen and Luciano Coelho