A good selection of great colored ornamental hot peppers
 

For anyone who likes to spice up (sorry for the pun!) the flower beds with non-flowers, or who enjoy tucking pots of plants here and there, the ornamental (and quite edible, but HOT) hot peppers are incredibly beautiful plants that are very, very easy to grow and produce like crazy.

Amongst those I've tried -

green foliage, white flowers, peppers that ripen pale yellow to lavendar to orange to red:

Centennial Rainbow, Gumdrop, Prettier in Purple (I stabilized from a cross), Lollipops (ditto).

purple foliage, purple flowers, peppers that ripen pale yellow to lavendar to cream, to yellow to orange to red:

Chinese Five Color, Festival (I stabilized from a cross), Spectral (ditto), Vietnamese Multicolor, Pretty in Purple, Bolivian Rainbow

variegated foliage - typically green, lavendar and white, peppers that go green to black purple to red:

Filius Blue, Trifetti, Variegata

Dark purplish green foliage, purple flowers, purple to black peppers ripen red:

Pretty Purple, Purple Robe, Little Nubian

Green and white foliage, green and white striped fruit ripen red:

Fish

Some pictures can be found here - [url]http://nctomatoman.topcities.com/HotPepperTable.htm[/url]

One thing I've noticed - the ease at which peppers cross, and perhaps because of this, the wide variability of plants from a named variety. So, with hot peppers, it is really difficult to know exactly what a particular variety is supposed to look like. The good news - the crossing makes it easy to come up with new things (after a few years of growouts and selections), and even the unexpected is a really attractive plant.

Many of these hot Peppers are also amazing in that they will even blossom and produce fruit if left in their 4 inch initial transplant pot!

If I were to choose my favorites for appearance, it would have to be Pretty Purple, chinese Five Color, Vietnamese Multicolor, and Bolivian Rainbow.

Anyone who has dared to taste/eat any of the above, I would love to have some commentary on flavor and relative levels of heat! I grow loads of hot peppers, but mostly just to look at them, save seed, and give away - the odd one does make it into our various spicy dishes, though.

I take it that Chinese Five Colour is the same as Thai Ornamental that ranges from cream to orange, pink then red and purple. Short bush good in pots. If it is the same use sparingly - I am a chilli lover and that one is Ballistic - sent me for the yogurt I can tell you. I'm growing Mild Green Jalapeno ( ball shape) and Hot Red Cayenne which is very prolific and has a kick like a horse even when green. Don;t know why I'm growing them because I'm the only one eats them. :oops: Maybe I'll cross one with Stupice :wink:

I grew Fish 2 years ago for the variegated (sp?) foliage. Then made a big mistake adding one to a chicken dish….BLISTERING heat! I had no idea.

The one taste DW and I can agree on that we don't like is Habenero. Yech!

cosmic - Chinese Five Color is not compact at all - it is relatively tall and columnar growing (gets to 3 feet in my garden). Vietnamese Multicolor is also tall and colunar, but the peppers are more slender (Five Color are more cone shaped and gumdrop sized). Bolivian Rainbow is a shorter, bushier variety, and sounds more like what you described.

I've got a Fish started in my window at work and it already has variegated leaves on it starting with its second set of true leaves. It's growing rather slowly though. The two Peter Peppers are growing incredibly fast. The Thai gold peppers are lagging the farthest behind.

I guess it's time to get serious and plant a couple of starter trays of ornamentals this weekend.

PV

I personally like Purple Robe for its gorgeous ornamental purple foliage. The peppers add a hint of the tropics when they turn red.

Other peppers that I grow include Purple Jalapeno which is delicious.

Very exciting to read that you are the root source of Festival, Lollipops and Spectral, Craig. PP shared those with me a few years ago. I have been hardpressed to find background information on them. Would you be able to do so, especially with regard to what the original F1s were? Many thanks.

Most ornamental hots are singularly lacking in flavour. The agreed exception seems to be Bolivian Rainbow, perhaps Fish (eaten traditionally in the green stage). That said, much depends on your definition of 'ornamental'. Must it also be compact, for example? Or simple worthy of functioning decoratively within a garden landscape? Many, many chiles grown primarily as edibles turn out to be absolutely beautiful plants.

For those wishing to avoid the risks associated with hot peppers in accessible garden spaces, Medusa, Little Dickens, Dainty Sweet and Sweet Pickles might be compact ornamental options.

Jennifer

Ah, making me think in terms of history...two are from donated fruit from plants, the other a stabilization of something that appeared in my garden. This is now edited with further info - dates, etc.

Lollipops - was at a local Fair produce and plant display in the late 1995, and was given a single fruit off an unnamed very attractive plant that was in a display. (saved as 95-28) (my starting name was State Fair Rainbow). So no known background, but I liked the color range and gave it a name - there is a good liklihood that this already has another name, though the donor did not know of it. I've grown it in 1996 (saved as 96-6), then as 99-20, 01-47, 02-25, 03-36 (must regrow it next year).

Spectral - this is a really odd one. Was at the Raleigh Farmer's Market in 2000 and a vendor had plants labeled Pretty in Purple. I was given one ripe fruit (saved seeds as 00-23). Well, the plant sure wasn't the Pretty in Purple I knew from Johnny's - it had obviously crossed somewhere. So I grew out seeds from the plant - they produced what is essentially a dark purple foliaged version of Chinese Five Color. Seems to be quite stable - grown out as 01-3, 02-11, 03-20, 04-33, 05-19 (I obviously like the color of this one, as it ends up in my plot every year).

Festival - same background as Purple Robe. In 1997, a really unusual hot pepper volunteered in my garden. The peppers were very slender and tiny - 1/16 inch wide by less than an inch long, but were doing the cream to violet to orange to red color thing. I managed to save one fruit prior to frost, which gave 4 seeds, saved as 97-25. Each seed germinated and gave 4 different looking peppers - very dark foliage, black purple fruit (which I worked on and named Purple Robe), not quite as dark foliage with multicolor peppers (= Festival), and two that were not as interesting - green foliaged, one had violet tinged flowers and bullet shaped fruit that went green to purple to red; the other was a longer green to red chile with white flowers. I've never done anything further with the other two selections. Purple Robe and Festival really started with those growouts in 1999. They seem to be reasonably stable, though especially with Festival, there is some variation - in fact, I appear to have stabilized dark and more pale leaf versions of each, but with the same fruit colors.

As to likely parents - Centennial Rainbow comes to mind as one of them, perhaps Pretty Purple or Bolivian Rainbow or Chinese Five Color.

That's pretty much it - now with even more mind numbing data!

Thanks heaps, Craig! That's much more than I had before.

Jennifer, who also has the lovely Purple Robe so must add info on that to database.

Addendum for Craig:

Remind me to send you seeds for some of the 20+ ornamentals in the 2006 field trials.

Another of my foci this year will be seasoning peppers, [i]chinense[/i] with the divine flavour of habs sans the heat. I must send you some if you aren't already familiar with them.

J

Rocoto
 

nctomatoman,
Did you experience self-sterility with your rocotos? I have heard this is an issue. How were they in terms of productivity?

Craig, I received some seeds from you a coupla years ago for Spectral, Prettier in Purple, and others and I grew them out along with allot of other peppers. That was the year we had a tornado and the wind blew all of the labels off of all of my little pots that had the peppers in them. So I labeled them the best I could and planted them out in the garden anyway. That was the best garden that I have had so far. They grew the most lovely peppers that I have ever seen in my life! I loved Spectral and Prettier in Purple ( at least what I supposed that was them as the labels blew off as explained above). Anyway, I thought that Spectral (if that was what it was?) was the tastiest pepper that I have ever tasted! I had a few seeds left that I am growing out this year to see if that was indeed the pepper that I thought that it was....if that makes sense? I could have gotten it mixed up with some Thai peppers that I got in a trade from someone in Calif. I didn't think that it was that hot.....but the ones that ended up completely purple when ripe....very hot! But I eat Wild Bird's Eye peppers raw so maybe I am not a good enough judge of that. It had a somewhat fruity taste to me....but I ate them (Spectral) in the green with purple blush stage. And, yes, everyone else here thinks that I am crazy for doing
that!

I found this thread on the last page of this forum! :) I think its better revive this than create another ornamental pepper thread. :D

Ornamental peppers
 

I grew the Chinese Five Color this year. Very pretty and will grow
again next year. Just took this picture this morning, I'm holding
it up because I never staked it. I have another in a small pot that
I think I will overwinter. That one only has purple and red peppers
at the moment.

[URL=http://s663.photobucket.com/albums/uu359/lrgarden/Garden%202010/?action=view&current=DSCN0314.jpg][IMG]http://i663.photobucket.com/albums/uu359/lrgarden/Garden%202010/th_DSCN0314.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

I was in SoCal last summer, and grew some Pretty in Purple plants. They fit in well in the flower bed, looking like mini Christmas trees with too many decorations. I ate the peppers from green to purple. Tasty little Hot peppers. Very attractive plants, some of which never got transplanted out of my grow out pots (6"), but did as well as some in the ground.