Lainaus käyttäjältä: Aji Inferno - helmikuu 11, 2012, 00:46:53 ap
Yes, I do understand your points about the privacy of the botanists and the legal restrictions around distributing the seeds from Brazil and other countries. It is a complex issue, though, I think. For example, capsicum lanceolatum was considered extinct not too many years ago. Now it is relatively common here in Finland among chili enthusiasts, thanks to someone who sent seeds to one of our leading chili researchers here - and he then decided to give seeds away to other growers. I believe, this was a very good thing to happen.

You're right, but we must consider that seeds of C.lanceolatum were distributed before 1992, so they are not affected by currrent conventions about wild material.

Lainaus
There are reasons - some quite valid ones - why the botanists generally don't like spreading rare seeds to hobbyist like us.

Unfortunately botanists must (or should) respect the laws of their country.
In our case however, there were no botanist directly involved.
We were in the wild and was only an our decision to take or not seeds.
Who think to go there and pick up seeds must however know that he have to transit a couple of Custom to go back home and if he's found in possession of seeds (or other wild material, especially animals) can pass some kind of trouble.

Lainaus
I myself discovered (to my knowledge) the first time ever, that capsicum flexuosum is extremely cold-resistant. My two plants survived a week of -25C temperature. That was absolutely amazing...

That's very interesting.
I have two plants outside since past Autumn, with temperatures down to -10°C and under zero for many consecutive days.
Next spring I will see if they will restart ...

Lainaus
Still, I wish there was some way we could help the botanists to save the very rare species by growing them in a responsible way - and also finding out things about those plants.

I agree that work of true keen on Capsicum is important!
With our passion we can get the maximum from our plants and notice a lot of interesting properties.
There is a chance to give an effective help to preserve and to deepen the knowledge about wild Capsicum; it's the so called "cultivation ex-situ"; it's not easy to be recognized as an association able to operate for this purpose, but we (as AISPES) will try.

We found many populations of 7 different species in the wild, but these plants (the eighth species) was seen in the growing area of the Department of Agronomy of an University, because the species came from Northern Brazil, while we visited South-Eastern areas (from Sao Paulo to North of Rio de Janeiro)
I will not tell the name of the University, because I'm not sure if the botanist would be glad to receive a lot of messages 
However, for who knows literature about wild Capsicum, it's not hard to find.

We were pleased to see and study many wild Capsicum in their natural habitat, we took a lot of photos and we tasted fruits of each species, but we didn't collect seeds.
As you know, according to the Convention of Rio de Janeiro 1992 about biodiversity conservation, exporting wild material (including seeds) from their origin countries is not allowed without the necessary permits.

The C.caatingae is a strange species.

The plants we saw were more than 4 meters high and wide.
They were formed by a great number of stems, some big as my arm.
Plants are 11 years old.

Flowers and fruits are grouped together in great number, up to 20 per node.
At the moment of our visit it was the beginning of the winter (begin of June) and there were quite few flowers, but in summer plants produce thousands of flowers.
Flowers colors are white, purple, green/yellow with a small line almost black inside; very nice!
Pods are small, like a pea, green when immature and yellowish when mature.
They are juicy and quite hot.
The pedicel shows a clear annular constriction (maybe they are a progenitor of C.chinense?).
Seeds are straw (yellowish) and smooth, while all the other SE Brasilian species we found have black and wrinkled seeds.

Small plants became woody at a very early stage; this species is more like a true tree than a bush as most of Capsicum.


Here a video of the plants.

http://www.pepperfriends.com/video/cparvifolium2.wmv

Many photos can be seen in our forum; I'll publish some here soon.

In the wild plants lives in an arid area; they often survive searching the shadow of big boulders, under which they push their roots to find humidity.

Hi to all.

I saw this topic and I wish to correct the translation from Italian to English, so it's more clear.
It's hard to understand Finnish language, even with Google translator, but if you are interested I can post something about C.caatingae in English.

Lainaus käyttäjältä: Lonewolf @ pepperfriendsHow it's known to all, a species that Marco and I have "seen" in Brazil is the Capsicum parvifolium.
The species is typical of northern Brazil, far away from the areas we visited.
But we could see two plants grown at the Department of Agronomy of an University.

As widely illustrated during the Congress AISPES, some details of the plants that we saw did not meet the definition of Capsicum parvifolium, in particular the absence of teeth.

Our perplexity were confirmed by Argentinian botanist G.E.Barboza who is preparing a scientific article on this subject.
The article at the moment is only available on a site of scientific publications for a fee and will be published shortly on "Systematic Botany", but we got a preview copy.
[now the article was published]

In summary, the article provides a new and more clear definition of C.parvifolium and describes two new species:
C.caatingae
C.longidentatum

The plants we saw on our trip were precisely C.caatingae, characterized by calyx without teeth, flowers / fruits in groups of many (up to 20) and straw seeds.

The C.parvifolium instead has calyx with rather obvious teeth, dark seeds, fewer flowers / fruits per node (up to eight)

The C.longidentatum is characterized by calyx teeth very long (up to 1 cm), pubescence on the whole plant (with the presence of dendritic trichomes), dark seeds, lack of pungency.

All species are typical of a semi-arid climate typical of northern Brazil and known as "caatinga"
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caatinga

The two new species have 24 chromosomes as the C.parvifolium.