C.flexuosum

Introduction

Landraces and wild relatives of important crops including Capsicums can be found in Paraguay. Among the Wild chilli's who are about to disappear because of the increasing deterioration of their natural ecosystem is C.flexuosum, a rare wild species not resprented in germplasm collections untill recently.

C.flexuosum has been treated as a variety of C.schottianum by Hunziker.

C.flexuosum is one of the lesser-known species in the Capsicum gene pool, native to south-eastern Paraguay, south-western Brazil and north-eastern Argentina. In 1950, Armando Hunziker, the internationally recognized specialist in Capsicum systematics, mistakenly confused C. flexuosum in Paraguay with C. schottianum, a species endemic to Brazil (Hunziker 1950).

In a later publication, after conducting fieldwork in coastal Brazil and studying the holotype of C. schottianum, he corrected his error of 1950 and clarified the distributions of the two species (Hunziker 1998). The first known germplasm accession of C. flexuosum was collected during a mission targeting several Capsicum species in Paraguay in 1998; however, less than 20 seeds were recovered.

Attempts to increase the first germplasm samples of C. flexuosum under greenhouse conditions suffered from poor seed set (Paul Bosland), likely caused by self incompatibility, suggesting the need for larger samples of germplasm.

Characteristics

C.flexuosum is a shrubby plant that grows from 0.5 to 1.5 meter, the leaves are dark and have a "wax" coated appearance that characterizes this species. The plant is very prolific and the flowers resemble to C.baccatum. The fruits are round slightly oval and range in diameter from 4 to 8 millimeters.

The fruits mature from green to orange and finally red. Remarkable is that immature fruits have a translucent color. The taste is sweet (ish) with a low heat level. It seems that the plant has a good resistance to cold/frost.

Plant

The plant below produced a large amount of flowers but without any fruit set. Even manual pollination with the plant's pollen did not resulted in any fruit set, but after cross-pollination with another C.flexuosum it managed to set fruit.

Young plant growing on fluorescent light in a 1 Liter container.

Plant growing outside in a 11 Liter container

Plant growing outside in a 6 Liter container

The plants outside have been manually pollinated with each others pollen, after they too failed to fruit with there own pollen. This resulted in a vigorous fruitset on both plants which confirmed the self-incompatibility of this species.

Flowers

Flower bud