Capsicum frutescens

Capsicum frutescens, the source of tabasco, bird, and piri-piri peppers, is a short-lived perennial shrubby herb in the Solanaceae native to tropical Central and South America and now cultivated and naturalized throughout the world's tropics and warm temperate regions. Plants reach 0.5 to 2 metres in height with woody, much-branched stems and glabrous to finely pubescent young growth. The alternate, simple leaves are ovate to elliptic, 4 to 12 centimetres long, entire, and slender-petiolate. The flowers are borne singly or in pairs at the nodes on erect pedicels and have a small five- or six-lobed greenish white to pale yellow rotate corolla with violet anthers. The fruit is a small, erect, narrowly conical to ovoid berry 1 to 4 centimetres long, ripening through green to bright red, orange, or yellow, with pungent placental tissue and a hollow interior containing flat pale seeds. Pungency is conferred by the capsaicinoid alkaloids, particularly capsaicin and dihydrocapsaicin, concentrated in the placenta.