Capsicum regale

Capsicum regale is a wild Andean-Amazonian species formally described in 2020. It was described from material collected in Caquetá, Colombia, and is now known from southern Colombia, eastern Ecuador, and northern Peru, mainly along the eastern slopes of the Andes at about 700 to 1900 m. It grows in the understory of premontane and montane humid tropical forest. The species name regale refers to its regal appearance and especially to the royal purple colouring that shows through the leaves, fruits, and fruiting pedicels.

It is a slender shrub usually about 2.0 to 2.5 m tall, sometimes reaching 3.0 m, with a thicker main stem and weak, horizontally spreading branches. The plant is glabrous, with markedly unequal paired leaves. The larger leaves are membranous, elliptic, and about 17.0 to 24.0 cm long by 5.0 to 9.5 cm wide, green on the upper surface and pale green beneath, with a prominent purple midvein and secondary veins that can appear lilac or green underneath. Smaller paired leaves are ovate and much shorter, about 2.0 to 5.0 cm long.

The inflorescences are especially distinctive, usually unbranched but sometimes shortly forked, carrying about 5 to 13 flowers on a short axis. The pedicels are 12 to 14 mm long, straight, and purple to green. The calyx is fleshy and cup-shaped, with 4 to 5 thick, reflexed, triangular-compressed purple appendages set close to the rim. The corolla is deeply stellate, about 7 to 8 mm long and about 1 cm across, pure yellow or yellow with maroon pigmentation, giving the flowers a striking look. The stamens are long-exserted, and the anthers are pale bluish to lilac.

The fruit is a small globose berry about 6 to 9 mm across. It begins green, turns nearly white and translucent as it approaches maturity, and then ripens to a dark blue to purple colour. The mature fruit is carried on a thickened, erect, brilliant dark purple pedicel about 18 mm long, with a conspicuous constriction where the berry joins the calyx. The fruiting calyx also becomes brilliant purple. Each berry contains about 7 to 17 flattened black seeds, about 2.7 to 3.4 mm long, with smooth seed coats and small spine-like projections along the margins.

Capsicum regale is one of the most visually unusual wild Capsicum species because of its combination of yellow deeply stellate flowers, purple pedicels and calyces, and fully mature dark blue to purple fruit. The original description also recorded a chromosome number of 2n = 26 and placed it in the Andean clade. Its known populations are small, and the original assessment treated it as Endangered because of habitat fragmentation and ongoing deforestation across parts of its range.