Capsicum pubescens
Rocotos and manzanos. Purple flowers, hairy leaves, black seeds and thick-walled pods. Handles cooler conditions than other species and rarely crosses with them.
Capsicum pubescens is rocoto and manzano, and it is the odd one out of the five. No wild ancestor of it has ever been found, it crosses with the other four only rarely, and you can identify it at a glance.
Three features nothing else has
- Purple flowers. No other domesticated Capsicum has them.
- Black seeds. Every other species has pale, straw-coloured seed.
- Hairy leaves and stems. Pubescens means downy, and that is what you are feeling for.
The pods are thick-walled and fleshy, closer to a small apple than to most chillies, which is where manzano gets its name.
Growing in the UK
Pubescens comes from the Andes and copes with cool conditions better than any other cultivated species. Cool-tolerant is not frost-hardy, and the distinction is worth holding onto: a frost still kills it.
What the cold tolerance buys you is a plant that keeps working when a chinense has stopped, and one that genuinely rewards overwintering. Kept frost-free it turns woody and long-lived, and second and third-year plants are far more productive than a first-year one. If you only overwinter one plant, make it this.
Be patient with it either way. Pubescens is slow from seed and slow to fruit, and a single British summer is often not long enough to see what it can do.
Compare Capsicum baccatum, the other South American species, which has spotted cream flowers and pale seeds.
