Capsicum mirabile

Capsicum mirabile is a wild Brazilian member of the Atlantic Forest clade, first published in 1846. Modern floristic and taxonomic sources place it in eastern and south-eastern Brazil, including Bahia, Espírito Santo, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo, where it occurs in the understorey, edges, and interior of wet Atlantic Forest, especially Dense Ombrophilous Forest and montane rainforest habitats.

The plant is characterised by a shrubby, dichotomously branched habit, glabrous to glabrescent or only sparsely pubescent growth, short petioles, and elliptic to ovate leaves, sometimes narrowly elliptic. Older descriptions and later taxonomic work alike emphasise the narrow elliptic foliage, the geniculate pedicels, and the glabrous calyx with five teeth as key structural traits. The flowers are stellate, with greenish-yellow spotting in the throat and dark red to red-violet spotting on the lobes, often with especially strong purple pigmentation in the buds.

The fruit are very small, globose to globose-depressed berries with black to brown-black seeds. A major published conflict exists over ripe fruit colour: current Brazilian Atlantic Forest treatments and keys describe the mature fruit as greenish-yellow, while the 2011 lectotypification treatment described mature fruit as bright red and darkening on dried specimens. Outside of that fruit-colour conflict, the core identity is consistent across sources, with the species recognised by its small pendent berries, black seeds with spine-like projections, and distinctive spotted corolla. The fruits are treated as without heat.