Capsicum longifolium

Capsicum longifolium is a wild Andean species formally published in 2019 from material collected in southern Ecuador, with documented collections from southern Ecuador and northern Peru. It grows in montane wet forest at about 1800 to 2200 m elevation, usually in shady interior primary forest, and phylogenetic work placed it as the first-diverging branch within the Andean clade.

It is a scandent, laxly branched shrub about 1.5 to 3.0 m tall with glabrous green stems marked by abundant lenticels and strongly anisophyllous paired leaves. The larger leaves are one of its defining traits, usually about 8.5 to 17.0 cm long and 1.0 to 2.5 cm wide, with a dark green shiny upper surface and a lighter green opaque underside. The species was named for these unusually long, narrow leaves, which were described as the longest and narrowest in the genus.

The flowers are usually borne in fascicles of 3 to 7, sometimes up to 9, on short shoots with pendent non-geniculate pedicels about 3 to 8 mm long. The buds are yellow or purplish yellow, and the corolla is about 6 to 8.5 mm long, stellate-campanulate, and mainly yellow, sometimes with red-brown edging or a brownish centre. One of the most distinctive structural traits is the calyx, which bears 2 to 3 thick appendages shaped like triangular compressed wings rather than slender teeth.

The fruit are small, globose berries about 8 to 13 mm across, slightly flattened at the apex, green when immature and orange at maturity. They are non-pungent, glabrous, and carried on pendent fruiting pedicels, with a persistent calyx whose appendages may remain short and broad or become longer and more slender. The seeds are black. The combination of a glabrous scandent habit, very narrow dark green leaves, clustered yellow flowers, wing-like calyx appendages, orange ripe fruit, black seeds, and its northern Peru to southern Ecuador range gives Capsicum longifolium a very distinct identity among the wild Andean Capsicum species.