Capsicum neei

Capsicum neei is a wild Bolivian species first published in 2019 by Gloria E. Barboza and Ximena Reyes. It is accepted by Kew and is native to Bolivia, with records centred in Chuquisaca and Santa Cruz. The species is endemic to the Boliviano-Tucumano Forest of central and southern Bolivia, especially the Serranías Iñao, Yahuañanca and Khaskha Orkho, where it grows in the understorey at the foot of cloud-forest hillsides and deciduous forest between about 1100 and 1750 m elevation. The epithet honours botanist Mike Nee, whose work in Bolivia helped separate this taxon as a distinct species.

The plant is a small, thin, erect shrub, usually 70 cm to 2 m tall and sometimes reaching 3 m, with a laxly branched upper habit. Young stems are green, slim, fragile and only lightly striate, while older bark becomes light brown and glabrous with a few oblong lenticels. The leaves are green on both surfaces, simple, membranous and largely glabrescent, with larger leaves usually about 6.7 to 11 cm long by 2.1 to 4.5 cm wide and smaller leaves about 2.7 to 6 cm long by 1.2 to 2.3 cm wide. Their shape is elliptic to ovate, with entire margins and an acute to obtuse tip.

Its flowers are one of the main identifying features. They are usually produced 2 to 4 per axil, rarely solitary, on green filiform pedicels that are pendent, slightly curved and not geniculate at anthesis. The calyx is cup-shaped, strongly nerved, and carries 10 unequal linear appendages, a character repeatedly used to separate Capsicum neei from the similar Capsicum minutiflorum. The corolla is delicate, stellate and yellow, sometimes entirely yellow and sometimes marked with small brownish-green spots at the base of the lobes and tube.

The fruit are small, globose berries about 4 to 7.5 mm in diameter. They begin green and mature red, with a smooth glabrous surface and pendent fruiting pedicels that widen towards the tip. PepperFriends describes ripe fruit at about 8.5 to 10.5 mm in diameter, showing some size variation in cultivated observation, but the core fruit identity remains the same: small, round, deciduous red berries on a wild Bolivian shrub with yellow flowers and a 10-appendaged calyx. Published taxonomic sources treat the fruit as pungent or probably pungent, placing the species with the hot-fruited Bolivian clade.