Peruvian Purple?

[svalli]

Last night I was reading Seeds of Change catalog and noticed that they had listed Peruvian Purple as C. frutescens. Chilewoman lists them as annuums. I do not know how to differentiate annuum from frutescens, but I believed them to be annuums. I got plants from a friend last summer and picture in the catalog looks just like the ones I had.

[Aji Inferno]

This is a subject I have discussed many, many times with Jukka (Fatalii)...

There seems to be no simple way to tell what some of these violet-flowered varieties truly are... For example, Bolivian Rainbow (at least some types of it) resemble Tabasco plant (c.frutescens) a bit too much to comfort. Yet, most researchers seem to agree that they belong to c.annuum. Knowing how thin the genetic line between both species is, it's not such a big wonder...

After all, one of the leading authorities, A.T.Hunziker recently ended up counting c.annuum, c.frutescens and even c.chinense as one single species: c.annuum. As different as these plants may appear and look, there just seems to be very little difference on genetic level. It's also known that the wild forms of all three are often impossible to distinguish from each other... So: perhaps we should just count these violet beauties as unidentified special parts of the "annuum" complex. Some may well have genes from both "real annuum" and "frutescens" sides, if not more...