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Chili peppers, a vegetable we take for granted in our daily lives, have become more popular than we think. In some areas, growing chili peppers has become as common as other vegetables, and every household cultivates some to ensure they can taste the freshest peppers. Typically, however, peppers are considered annual plants, i.e. harvested the year they are sown, with little chance of growing into the following year. However, on the Internet, we often hear that some people are able to plant peppers into trees, such as a video posted by a netizen not long ago, claiming that the "pepper tree" they raised has been growing for three years, which has aroused everyone's curiosity and heated discussion.
From the video, it can be clearly seen that the netizen's "pepper tree" has shown signs of lignification, like a small shrub, which is very different from traditional annual herbs. However, many netizens doubted this, questioning whether it was really a chili pepper, some thought it might be belladonna or other plants, and some were shocked because they learned for the first time that chili peppers are also capable of surviving cold winters. This raises an important question: Why do peppers, a plant often defined as an annual herb, grow into trees? Along the way, we also need to explore the kinship of peppers to the tomatoes we know, as well as their origin and history.
The scientific name of the pepper is Capsicum annuum, where the word "annuum" means "annual". However, in the origin of the pepper, it is actually a perennial plant that, without severe frosts, can grow for several seasons, gradually growing into a tall shrub. This is reminiscent of the way local people grow peppers, somewhat similar to the way we grow fruit trees. However, the reason for the naming "annuum" may be related to the fact that chili peppers were originally introduced to Europe, and the cold winter months in Europe made it difficult for peppers to survive here, so naming it "annual" helps distinguish it from other capsicum species in its native area.
In fact, in the pepper origin, it may have always been a perennial plant, with some similarities to fruit trees such as peach and pear trees that we are familiar with. However, this point seems to have been overlooked, probably because chili peppers were first introduced to Europe and popularized there. Annual plants have many advantages over ancient technologically underdeveloped times, especially when it comes to breeding, as they have shorter selective breeding cycles that help breed the most edible varieties. Similarly, tomatoes are perennials native to the Americas, but gradually evolved into annual plants after entering the Old World, and their earliest wild varieties were slightly toxic and more acidic. This process was carried out by simply selecting the best-growing and best-tasting fruit, preserving its seeds, and then repeatedly planting and selecting, resulting in the tomato taste we know today.
Another advantage of annual plants is their greatly shorter selective breeding cycle, which may also be one of the reasons for the widespread spread and popularity of peppers. However, why peppers can grow into trees remains a mystery worth investigating.
For many, it's hard to understand why pepper, a type of herbaceous plant, and a few other similar plants, grow into shrubs. Herbaceous plants usually refer to those plants that contain only a small number of lignified cells in their rhizomes, and their rhizomes are relatively fragile and difficult to survive the cold winter months. However, it is worth noting that although these plants have fewer, but not completely absent lignified cells, most herbaceous plants only need enough growth time to accumulate enough lignified stems. Often, they do not grow for enough time, mainly due to changes in temperature throughout the seasons. Therefore, if greens are grown in African regions where temperatures remain above 20 degrees Celsius all year round, these plants will also be able to grow hard stems.
This phenomenon was confirmed in a video where a blogger planted Chinese greens in Africa, and as a result, the greens grew so tall that the blogger could pick several leaves a day for food. Many herbaceous plants do not have woody branches mainly because they are killed by frost in most cases, so one of the criteria for judging whether they are herbaceous is to see if they can grow growth rings. Growth rings are those that grow when trees change from season to season, while herbaceous plants do not usually form growth rings. However, some perennial herbs have lignified stems, and chili pepper is one of them. This means that peppers can actually grow into shrubs without being killed by frost.
The evolution of land plants can be traced back to primordial mosses, which evolved from water and are closely related to water for their survival and reproduction. Subsequently, they developed primitive ferns, which were usually short and dependent on water for sexual reproduction. It was not until about 385 million years ago that the first tall dendritic plants appeared, with trunks and branches, belonging to the most primitive seed plants, known as the genus Archaeopteryth, which were gymnosperms with the characteristics of ferns that adapted to dry terrestrial environments. A key factor in this evolutionary process is the emergence of seeds, as taller plant bodies are able to produce more seeds and thus more opportunities to reproduce.
However, why annual and perennial herbaceous plants exist in angiosperms has become a mystery. Angiosperms are considered to be one of the evolutionary clades of gymnosperms, but the evolutionary history of angiosperms remains unclear because of the absence of a fossil record for a long time. Some scholars believe that the earliest angiosperms may have been perennial woody plants that then differentiated into annual and perennial herbs, while others believe that the earliest angiosperms may have been herbaceous. Although controversial, the fact is that herbaceous angiosperms have readopted their ancestral growth forms and evolved themselves into dwarf plants. However, as mentioned earlier, this growth form is not conducive to survival and reproduction for angiosperms, but herbaceous angiosperms still appear.
The earliest herbaceous angiosperms may have evolved into this form as a driver of climate change, in which herbaceous plants avoid the hazards of winter frosts by reducing aboveground biomass. However, recent studies have found that although herbaceous plants are less viable than woody plants, they are more robust in the face of a variety of risks, including frost, herbivores, and other unpredictable risks. This super-risk-resistant group in herbaceous plants has had a profound impact on the evolution of angiosperms. Because of this, herbaceous angiosperms replaced gymnosperms and primitive ferns over the next century or so as the dominant plants in the world, accounting for 80% of greenery.
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